Quotes About Interpretation

Sometimes people try to read into my strip and find out what my state of mind is. And I can say if I'm in a good mood, generally the comic strip starts out in a good mood, but the punchline is very negative and sour.

With 'The Tudors,' I had a huge amount of material, I mean so many books and so much stuff about what they really said. So, in a way it was kind of trying to strip it out and find the stories inside all this material.

Taking a comic strip character is very hard to write. Because comics are meant to work in one page, to work in frames with minimalistic dialogue. And a lot of it is left to the imagination of the reader. To do that in film, you've got to be a little more explanatory. And that requires a good screenplay and good dialogue.

To me, a staircase looks like a series of dark and light horizontal stripes, which is exactly how you'd draw a staircase. So I know how the image is going to look on the page.

Kanye is producing in the true sense of the word. 'Real Friends' was an idea started by me and Boi-1da. We passed it off to Kanye, and Kanye kind of stripped it down and had Havoc add some drums to it. Kanye had the vision. That's really true-school production.

Some of the reviewers wanted less. Some wanted lots more. Some wanted lots more of something else. But these strips are exactly what they are.

It's a very powerful, emotional thing to read a book, and to reduce it to a series of questions in a test strips something away from the book.

I strive to be brief, and I become obscure.

I think there is a debate in the arts about, you know, whether we must strive for art for art's sake, and you know, kind of try to keep political debate out of our work. And to that I say, I'd like you to show me an example of, you know, this so-called apolitical art. I don't think there's any such thing.

Actors are there to represent the human condition back to itself. It's never about the actor. It's about the content. That's what I strive for in my work.

When I write a book, characters come to life for me somewhere at the back of my head. I strive to make them flesh and blood in an abstract way, in words.

Judges have to have the humility to recognize that they operate within a system of precedent, shaped by other judges equally striving to live up to the judicial oath.

I find that music makes people just sit and listen, firstly. Then, they seem to interpret their own emotions with the music and it makes them ponder their own life a lot. And then they start to question: Am I happy in my work? Am I happy in my relationships? What am I striving for?

As an actor, I'm constantly striving to find the darkness in the lighter characters and the lightness in the darker characters.

Take 'The Stroke,' for instance. Plenty of people saw sexual connotations in that song but to me it was about what goes on in the business world.

In a painting, you can't make out whether the artist painted the left eye before the right eye. In Chinese calligraphy, you can see the progression of the artist's stroke.

For a time, I really thought acting was just impersonating. But impersonation is just big brush strokes, really. What makes acting different is empathy.

I feel, in drama, you don't need to be fed everything. Even though sometimes when you watch, you want to know what happened and you want to see it, I feel like sometimes it's so much stronger to see the effects that those actions have had.

You can sometimes get your own feelings across more strongly if you pretend that you're singing it from someone else's angle. But it's always from me. It's just a new way of framing it.

With any cover, I like to choose songs that affected me strongly already. So it's tough sometimes to take a song that you love so much and put your own spin on it because you get such a strong feeling from the original.

I do think that narrative is very important - I think that we use narrative to organize the world around us, and so it does matter a lot what kinds of narratives we have in our inventories and which ones are reinforced so often and so strongly that we habitually reach for them without thinking.

Yes, I do bring something of my own to the plate. But I strongly believe that a film is a director and writer's vision.

When I've seen my operas in Europe, they have always struck me as more American than when I hear them here. I can't tell you what that phenomenon is.

Talking about covers, whether visually or sonically, if a particular combination of notes struck a chord in your heart in a way that you want to be a part of it by covering that song, then there's nothing wrong with it.