Quotes About Interpretation

It all starts from the lyric with me. If I work really hard on the lyric and get it right, then it will tell me whatever else to do, where to go.

I define art as a work created by a human that has a unique point of view and discovers something that was not there before.

Often you read something about yourself, and either you've been ironic, and that doesn't work in print, or it paraphrases something that you said, and has a different meaning.

When you work with someone you don't quite know, you have to figure the director out and you can come up with ideas that are counter-productive.

I always find that it's when a script is not detailed, then I have to do more work as an actor.

Artists are modest. They know they're not doing the work; they're just taking dictation.

We sort of understand how painkillers work. You take one, and it reduces your headache. We don't understand how photographs work. And that, to me, is an essential problem as a practitioner.

The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.

The thing about art for me is that you can go on theorising your work forever, because it's open to interpretation.

When you work in film, you have to be pretty fluent in explaining your vision, especially when speaking to actors, and I found speaking to actors to be so challenging and intimidating on set.

I tend not to analyse my work, though I'm frequently intrigued when other people take time to do so.

Improvisation helps because you get what's on the page and you make it a little more palatable to your tongue. And that's the beauty of creating and being spontaneous. That's the way I love to work.

In my work, I construct texts and images. Between those two points the blur occurs. Each is altered by the other again and again, back and forth.

I just mean it's very difficult for me to watch my work, in some ways, because I am critical of what I didn't get across or I thought I was making one point.

Work can take on a new dimension if you know something about the artist.

It is an admonition to myself when I am reading other people's books. Writing a book is very difficult to do, even a bad one. I try to remember that when reading someone else's work.

It is hard for me to speak of themes. I like the reader to do that. Otherwise it feels like writing a 3rd grade essay on someone else's work.

If you accept the idea that photographers, or some of them, are actually artists, then you have to look at their work less as a document of something than as a personal vision of the world.

I've always said that I myself am not the best audience for my own work, because I'm just not that receptive to comedy.

In my opinion in art nothing can go too far as long as you don't physically hurt people or animals. Art is there to push boundaries. I love it when my work freaks people out but it's all fake!

This is how I understand literature - as a kind of remix or echo chamber. What's going on in a literary work are other literary things disinterred, cannibalized, and recombined.

I could see the works just living in reproductions. The work lives on like fantasy. Some live even better as just an image.