Quotes About Interpretation

I'm useless at staring at a piece of white paper. But if you put a piece of white paper with a black line on it in front of me, I'll say no that black line should be red and it should go this way or that way.

Writing books can be very individual - one might strike you as helpful that someone else found useless, or that you might not have appreciated at some other time in your life.

Hard numbers tell an important story; user stats and sales numbers will always be key metrics. But every day, your users are sharing a huge amount of qualitative data, too - and a lot of companies either don't know how or forget to act on it.

I'm not actually perishing, but I do feel like I die a little every time someone uses 'literally' to mean 'really.'

There is no more reason why the features belonging to a picture should be distorted for the purpose of such imaginative suggestion than that the poet's metaphors should spoil his words for the ordinary uses of man.

What I think happens, and that you have to acknowledge though, is that a director uses a book as a launching pad for his own work and that's always very flattering.

Science always uses metaphor.

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.

The relationship with the words someone uses is more intimate and integrated than just a quick read and a blurb can ever be. This intimacy - the words on the page being sent back and forth from engaged editor to open author - is unique in my experience.

There is nowhere in the four Gospels where Jesus uses the word 'homosexual.'

'Right' and 'wrong' aren't words a linguist uses.

'Porgy and Bess' has never been thought of as a dance show, and yet it's filled with dance. It uses dance to punctuate the action, or as background, or as atmosphere; even when it's front and center, it isn't crucial.

One of the interesting things about quoting in an artwork is that there is a repeated confusion about who is speaking - one essentially becomes the author of a quote one uses.

Not every coach uses the same terminology.

Even tiny children looking at a picture book are using their imaginations, gleaning clues from the images to understand what is happening, and perhaps using the throwaway details which the illustrator includes to add their own elements to the story.

Galileo got it wrong. The earth does not revolve around the sun. It revolves around you and has been doing so for decades. At least, this is the model you are using.

Just like using an instrument, a song calls for different things.

Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.

With plays that require any kind of reading program, I'm reading for a couple of years before using the material.

It's often wrong to write for specific actors because one ends up using what is least interesting about them, their mannerisms and habits. I prefer not to write for specific people.

So much of my career has been about saying things the way people say them, using melodies not that I can sing but that the people can sing.

Films can only be made by by-passing the will of those who appear in them, using not what they do, but what they are.

The usual comment from psychologists and psychiatrists was that it's best not to encourage people to look at their dreams because they are liable to stir up problems for themselves.

I see my writing as the process of looking at the usual, but from two steps to the side.