Quotes About Interpretation

I don't like pictures in books. I feel that the pictures diminish the words, and the words diminish the pictures, and it doesn't work.

The phrasing didn't work as well.

It does not follow, that because a particular work of art succeeds in charming us, its creator also deserves our admiration.

I never read anything concerning my work. I feel that criticism is a letter to the public which the author, since it is not directed to him, does not have to open and read.

Everybody has his own great ideas about what my art should be. But I can do whatever I like and there aren't many constraints to the way I work, whether I'm using a brush with ink or paint.

My work is more driven by the creative word. It's immersed in other writing and printed work, rather than drawn so much from life or past experience.

In a way, a lot of my work is in the re-writing once it is cast, as I adapt to the rhythms of how the roles are played out by the actors.

I can see the character in a photograph, in the way a guy stands or holds his hands, the way he buckles his belt. I fantasize a lot looking at photographs. I'm sure that doesn't work for many people.

It is a shame to see in the work of an artist the limitations of his critics.

Hardly anyone still reads nowadays. People make use of the writer only in order to work off their own excess energy on him in a perverse manner, in the form of agreement or disagreement.

Personally, I feel that in my own work I wanted to look programmed or impersonal but I don't really believe I am being impersonal when I do it. And I don't think you could do this.

What the work of art looks like isn't too important.

You know, essentially when you do a play you're reinterpreting a work of art that already exists. That's not what happens with a movie.

The definition of art has changed almost every day since the first artist created the first work at least fifty thousand years ago.

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.

If the guy behind the camera is not good, the pictures are bad. It's still you, and it's the same lines and everything, but it doesn't work.

Translations increase the faults of a work and spoil its beauties.

An editor is someone dedicated to destroying the work of a creator.

Good art has everything you need to know about it in the work, not on a wall label. Art is here to take us beyond language.

Never judge a work of art by its defects.

I see the canvas and I begin... It's a necessary evil to get into the work, and it's pretty marvelous to be able to get out of it.

There is a deep question whether the possible meanings that emerge from an effort to explain the experience of art may not mask the real meanings of a work of art.

I work really out of mythology, so often I work out of a story that has remained lodged inside somehow, or I work out of history, you know, out of a sense of historical inevitability with characters.

I think you don't do work for controversy alone, and whenever you do new work which people don't understand and they say it is done to create controversy.