Quotes About Interpretation

I've always loved that, on all the Dylan and Springsteen and Marley and Neil Young reissues that they've done: It's so cool to hear alternate versions and how the song started in their mind.

I think when you're a fan of a book you do have your own little version of the characters and I hope that some people feel we are the versions they might have imagined.

A lot of times, that's hard to capture: what you sound like in person versus what you sound like on record. If I had total control, I would do a lot of the old songs - not only my songs but Sam Cooke songs, Luther Vandross, melody songs. That's what I would really do if I had an opportunity to do a record.

It is time... to end the long-standing and unproductive methodological debate over 'originalism' versus 'dynamism' or 'evolution' and focus instead on how, as a substantive matter, we should interpret the Constitution in the twenty-first century, and what it has to say on questions unimaginable to our eighteenth-century Framers.

I still really love the world and the universe and the mythology of 'Halo.' If I was given control, I would really like to do that film. But that's the problem. When something pre-exists, there's this idea of my own interpretation versus 150 other people involved with the film's interpretation of the same intellectual property.

I think it's always interesting how music means different things to different people, and people who overthink it are looking to in some ways show off with music, versus people who just respond to a song and decide to sing it.

I feel like, paying homage to an artist, it's better to do something that's inspired by them - a new work that's inspired by them - versus another person saying they redid your song.

Every actor is different, but it's a very fine line when it comes to how much information they have versus how much they need to let their imagination fill in the blanks.

If you read the whole Vertigo 'Animal Man' series of 89 issues or whatever, each writer has a completely different take on his origin. If you try to put them all together, they contradict one another. I had to pick and choose to make up a new origin that makes sense to new readers.

I analyse in my own way, in very simple, no-jargon language. If somebody is talking in very complicated way, I never like that.

Each day we understand better what the Indians say, and they us, so that very often we are intelligible to each other.

Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.

Writers, not psychiatrists, are the true interpreters of the human mind and heart, and we have been at it for a very long time.

I love to be a vessel through which characters can come through. And if I can move an audience with my work, then I've done my job.

If I hear a story or a fact about somebody I don't know and have never met, it's like getting a hollow vessel that you can fill up with whatever you want. That's more tempting to me than to try to replicate what I actually know.

There's probably a couple someones that are gonna hear the songs and go, 'I think that might have been about me,' or, 'I know it's about me.' I do play that pretty close to the vest. I don't think I'm ever gonna write a song and drop somebody's name in it.

People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words.

When a kid can understand that a word can mean two things, there's some real thinking going on. They have a vested interest in finding out what a word means, because it's the punch line to a joke.

If you present your dog to a veterinarian with the instruction to put him to sleep, you would normally mean something very different than you would upon taking your wife or husband to an anesthesiologist with the same words.

My interest is in how meaning is communicated via language, and I believe the shape, positioning, even the color of the language has an effect on meaning.

The one thing that 'Via Dolorosa' has is no opinions. To me, curiosity is 50 times as valuable as opinion.

There's all kinds of ways to be misunderstood, and one of them is via the interview.

Computers can see, and understand what people say via speech recognition.