Quotes About Interpretation

If I'm playing a violin thing, for instance, I tend to respond to that sound with the way I finger.

I learned, too, how it was possible with the help of the picture and action to transform an apparently insignificant violin passage into an incident, and to lift a simple horn call into a thing of stupendous significance by means of scenic emphasis.

Yes, I mean like you know, having studied with Yehudi Menuhin that is like some direct route into Bach, because he was one of the foremost interpreters of Bach for the violin.

When I first wrote for orchestra, I didn't realize, when you have 20 people playing a violin line, that is very different than one person playing that line.

Often the 'lead' of a classical song will have something really cool to its melody that - even though it might be a violin or something doing it in the song - I end up wanting to try something like that with my voice.

The greatest texts, I think, first dazzle, then with careful rereading, they instruct. I have learned from Virginia Woolf more than I even know how to articulate.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

For a novelist, the great thing about the Stone Age people is that we know virtually nothing about their beliefs - which means that I get to make it up! But it's still got to be plausible.

What's vice today may be virtue, tomorrow.

What is the best music is impossible to define. Just because it's played by a virtuoso player, doesn't mean it's great music. It might not reflect the soul of a people, which is really my criteria for great music.

We are carrying these images out into the world, and we can't control how people contextualize those images no matter how virtuous our aspirations and our intentions are.

Fine-tuning a play like 'Uncle Vanya,' which is already well-known to the people playing it, is not so much a verbal exercise as it is a visceral one.

I don't know what the inspiration for most of songs really mean until I finish them. For the most part, I'm going for a visceral impression, and I write the words last.

It's different for people who have not seen a symphony conductor conduct from a chair. I feel very connected to the orchestra in a way that a conductor sometimes does not feel. I think it's more visceral.

My painting is visible images which conceal nothing... they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.

The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.

Each action of the actor on the stage should be the visible concomitant of his thoughts.

Surely one of the most visible lessons taught by the twentieth century has been the existence, not so much of a number of different realities, but of a number of different lenses with which to see the same reality.

There is a considerable amount of manipulation in the printmaking from the straight photograph to the finished print. If I do my job correctly that shouldn't be visible at all, it should be transparent.

The better the acting is, the less visible the director and the less visible the actor.

A design that I create is like my own extension. It's 'thinking made visible.'

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.

The cinematographer's basically translating the director's vision into imagery.