Quotes About Interpretation

There are plenty of bad actors and there are plenty of bad directors. There are actors who will always be bad and there are good actors who you cry for because they're being badly directed or the material isn't good enough.

Acting makes you live plenty of lives.

Many of my favorite films, if someone were to tell me simply what they're about, I probably wouldn't be that interested. Plot often has so little to do with what's at the heart of a film.

What I look for in a script is the plot point and whether they're strong, obviously, or not, whether the characters are rich or not, and if I can do justice to the character or not. Some movies you look at and the script is so bad that no one can do anything with the script.

When you describe a character's dream, it has to be sharper than reality in some way and more meaningful. It has to somehow speak to plot, character, and all the rest.

As long as I like the script, speak the language and feel interested in the plot, I can play any role.

I always like to think of music as if you were to turn the picture off, actually. Just by listening to the piece of music, there's a story there and a connection to the characters and the plots and all of that.

Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Music is not always going to be a mechanical math equation, where it's one plus one equals two. It's not always that simple.

I can make 10 jackets of the same colour, same two pockets and same length, that will look like 10 completely different jackets when you put them on. It's about the way they are cut - it makes them look and feel completely different and move differently, and that's a never-ending study. People who wear my clothes will know exactly what I mean.

After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

Usually, a number of events will be going on around me to start me on a book. What I mean is, I will have read a poem or seen a picture that is lingering in my mind.

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.

The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.

With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.

Manipulating shadows and tonality is like writing music or a poem.

What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.

The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.

Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.

I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem.

A poem is bound by language, but a poetics is not.

Poetry, as odd as it is, and as hard to figure out as it is, many times, it's almost something that we're used to. It's kind of like a dream language that we had centuries ago, so that when we speak poetically or write a poem about what's going on, a real difficult issue that's facing our communities, people listen.

A perfect poem you can't pin down and say, 'This is exactly what it meant to me.' It's not a self-help manual.