Quotes About Interpretation

A lot of things that I write about have happened to people around me, if not necessarily to me or in the organizations I've worked in. Having said that, it's fiction and has a lot to do with my imagination and creativity.

Faulkner was almost oriental. I never got into Faulkner.

There is no original truth, only original error.

I mean, there are only so many notes. What makes something original is how you put it together.

If someone has already done a role I'm about to do, I won't watch the original until after I'm finished playing the role.

My idea of covers is that you should never cover a song and do it exactly like the artist because everyone's always going to compare it to the way the original artists did it, and they're just going to go, 'Oh I like the original better.'

Writing is much more satisfying on a certain level than acting ever was. Because you're not interpreting someone else's original idea, you can come up with your own.

To me acting originally became an extension of game playing.

A novel means a new way of doing a story. If you go back the origins of a novel, 'Clarissa' - that's not a novel; it's just a bunch of letters. But it isn't! Because it's organised in a particular way! A novel is what you make of it.

Imagine a world without art: it's George Orwell's nightmare!

That's the secret to anything we write. You have to bring your experience to it. Otherwise, how do you expect anyone else to connect to it?

At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there'd be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.

When we can't determine what is art - when you get to that point where we're not sure, that's the greatest likelihood that we're actually experiencing something great. But I think that's what the art world is most afraid of, because you lose that security. Then we don't know how to assign evaluation, whether it's cultural or otherwise.

I hate when a movie just sort of ends and is so open-ended you feel like it wasn't finished. I appreciate leaving things up to the interpretation of the audience and letting them make decisions about where things will go in the future - but the director has to make a decision; otherwise it is sort of a cop-out.

A great interpreter of life ought not himself to need interpretation.

I look at the story, I look at the idea and just try to think of it in terms of that whole body of myth and see where the characters fit in and what they ought to be doing-all those archetypes are there to play with.

I never really understood the idea that nonfiction ought to be this dispensary of data that we have at the moment.

We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.

Most great plays of the past lose their grip on immediacy; on application to our lives right now.

I think a director can make a play happen before your eyes so that you are part of it and it is part of you. If you can get it right, there's no mystery. It's not about mystery. It's not even mysterious. It's about our lives.

Our music, you either get it or you don't. There's no middle ground.

I don't think our music has much to do with math rock.

Ours is the job of interpreting the Constitution. And that document isn't some inkblot on which litigants may project their hopes and dreams.

Remember, the West's rock or pop was created for their languages, not ours.