Quotes About Interpretation

As an actor, I come to set, and I have already broken the character down by writing a poem about the character. I try to write in his voice, the way he would write it.

Your response to literature is to do with maturity; if you don't respond to a book or a poem when you are 12, you might when you are 13.

I've approached every character I've ever played with a poem, first and foremost.

The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.

When you break a poem down in order to perform it, you have to engage closely with many aspects of what it's about, how it works, how it's constructed and so on. If you write a poem alongside it, to complement it, you start to feel poetry's method, poetry's way of looking at things.

You pass a poem to the audience through the words as embodied literally by the rest of your human form. And the people listening and watching come back at you in an equally embodied way.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Poems are not read: they are reread. Reread the poem, then read between the lines, then look at it, then watch it, then peek at it: handle it like an object. Contemplate its shadows, angles and dimensions.

Looking across the many strands of poetry, we can never be certain which poems were only read in private and which were performed - and there are thousands of poems which were performed but never got written down.

The Hollywood movies are more like novels, and the kinds of films I make are more like poems.

I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.

I've always thought my poems told stories.

I like poems that are complex.

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

I think of myself as a writer who photographs. Images, for me, can be considered poems, short stories or essays. And I've always thought the best place for my photographs was inside books of my own creation.

So many poems you go into and come up empty.

An actor is at most a poet and at least an entertainer.

For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.

The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate.

In a way you can feel that the poet actually is looking over your shoulder, and you say to yourself, now, how would this go for him? Would this do or not?

I'm not a journalist; I'm a poet.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don't get it, I'm not sure why you are doing it.