Quotes About Interpretation

Look, mass and class is just a matter of conjecture.

When you write something you know, you're making a story that will work, whether or not there's bits taken. It's always funny to me when people say, 'Well, it's clearly autobiographical,' and I say, 'Well, how do you know my autobiography?' Certainly, there are things that are connected, but I just think it's a very interesting assumption.

I don't really care about audio quality. If people saw some of the ways that I record stuff, they'd see I don't care in that respect. I obviously care about things sounding good, but I think quality exists through other things like emotionally connecting with a lyric or a feeling, or whatever.

In music, you feel a connection to the voice and think about the person behind it. In art that's secondary.

When we read a book, we have a blurry image that's kind of physical but blurry. But we have an emotional image also. We have an emotional connection to the character.

Generally, if I read something that I think is really good and that I feel a connection with and is right for me, I see and hear who the guy is, as manifested by me.

What I love about film is that everybody often connects to something so different, and things you couldn't anticipate when you were making the film, so you just make it as honest as possible.

Not every work of art connects with the audience.

Whenever it is inspired by literature a film is elevated and the audience connects.

When something sounds good, I don't think any of the connotations matter.

It wasn't a conscious decision to be bold or anything. It all depends on how different artists envision me.

We don't see the Bible as it is itself. We see it in relation to a lot of people who surround it. And because we don't care for some of them, we think we shouldn't care for it.

The things we make have one supreme quality - they live longer than us. We perish, they survive; we have one life, they have many lives, and in each life they can mean different things. Which means that, while we all have one biography, they have many.

A work survives its readers; after a hundred or two hundred years, it is read by new readers who impose on it new modes of reading and interpretation. The work survives because of these interpretations, which are, in fact, resurrections: without them, there would be no work.

In Hebrew, the name Susan means 'graceful lily' - in Khmer, it means 'girl with the bad puns,' and in ancient Aztec, it translates as 'she with the cockerel hair and dirty glasses.'

What really disconcerts commentators, I suspect, is that when they read historical fiction, they feel their own lack of education may be exposed; they panic, because they don't know which bits are true.

I suspect that the framers of the Bill of Rights have long since rolled over in their graves.

I've always been curious about how much of our cultural baggage we bring to what and how we read. I suspect we bring a lot, although we like to think we don't.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

To speak about notation as the only way that you can guarantee structure of course is already very suspect.

Comedy comes easily to me, and so for me, comedy is suspect.

I suspect that we get used to particular sorts of stories being presented in particular sorts of ways, and we're so used to interpreting them and understanding what it is they're doing that we think of those forms and styles as faithful, complete depictions of reality.

The more words we are allowed to take, the freer we become. If our mouth is banned, then we attempt to assert ourselves through gestures, even objects. They are more difficult to interpret, and take time before they arouse suspicion.

From depicting the past, so goes the suspicion, it is a short step to glorifying the past.