Quotes About Interpretation

I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.

I was to Japanese visitors to Washington what the Mona Lisa is to Americans visiting Paris.

The world defines 'waste' very differently than Jesus does.

It's a waste to not say anything with art.

For me, the work begins with a rough cut of the film. I can't do much with the script. I've tried to write music to a script prior to seeing the film, but I've found it turns out to be a waste of time.

I like reading books with both hands, with my heart pumping, with blood on the page. So I'm interested in people who make stuff, and I'm interested in the lives that make the text. To read a book or watch a movie any other way, to me, personally, feels like a waste of time and misapplication of energy.

If you don't know what is being said, the rest of the actor's work is wasted.

For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. He excites me when I watch him. He moves me. He's the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.

I can watch films and say how technically beautiful they are, but I'm not impressed by any technicality.

The best conversation with Stanley Kubrick is a silent one: you sit in a theatre and watch his films and you learn so much.

Gotta watch out for directors.

I give the spectator the possibility of participating. The audience completes the film by thinking about it; those who watch must not be just consumers ingesting spoon-fed images.

I think it's insulting to an audience to make them sit and watch a film and then give them a message in one sentence.

I feel kind of offended when I watch films, and everything is explained to me - you know, laying out how I should feel from one scene to the next.

I watched the guy that hits a home run, and he comes across the plate and he points skyward, like thanking for the help from the Almighty to hit the home run. And as he does that, I say to myself, 'God screwed the pitcher.' And I don't know how else you look at it.

I would spend hours absorbing every intonation, every inflection - how the singer would convey a sentiment and how it would sound coming out of their head. All of those things I very carefully watched and absorbed, and so I guess I was studying my whole life, although not in any sort of conventional way.

Many people who have watched 'Pieta' have said my filmmaking has become more objective.

I watched aspirationally. I looked at movies that maybe I didn't entirely understand but which developed in me some thirst for their subjects or for their context, and that became part of how I came to understand the world.

I've always been someone who really watches other people, human behavior. To watch it and be able to express it through your version has always been really exciting to me.

I pretty much believe that a film is a film and when an audience watches a film, they finish it.

No one watches 'Taxi Driver' and says, 'Oh, it's a male-oriented film.' No one looks at nine-tenths of the films out there that are headlined by men and say, 'It's a male-oriented film.'

I just grew up watching a lot of movies. I'm attracted to this genre and that genre, this type of story, and that type of story. As I watch movies I make some version of it in my head that isn't quite what I'm seeing - taking the things I like and mixing them with stuff I've never seen before.

With bad movies, I have this image in my head of the director and the editor in the editing room watching a scene that is not happening, looking at each other and saying, 'Put some music in there.'

Conducting, I tried it once off the cuff, and quickly realized there were subtle aspects that I was missing. There is a lot more to it that I was able to grasp simply by watching conductors.