Quotes About Interpretation

When I act, I try to understand the character, why she's behaving like that.

If language did not affect behavior, it could have no meaning.

Elegance for one society is not elegance for another. It's in the eyes of the beholder.

My advice gets misconstrued as being mean.

As an actor, you have to be able to put yourself into the character since your job is literally making the character and the situation he is in believable.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

I try and take it for what it is, and I'm very at peace with the fact that when I'm done with the songs, they don't belong to me anymore. They belong to the listeners.

The camera is not your eye, and it's not the eye of the audience. I don't think it's my eye, either. It belongs to the film.

I always felt once it goes into movie land, the book belongs to someone else.

One man's faith is another man's delusion. . . .

All true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.… We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

There are no true answers, just shades of grey, coincidence, and circumstance.

The world didn't always sound right when it was first explained.

Fact is what we can see or discern; truth is the larger significance we extrapolate from those facts.

But amongst a group who hadn't read it an opinion was beginning to form

Given humans' tendency to see themselves as the pivots around which all creatures' lives spun, the bewildered travelers assumed the wolves were talking to them.

B. A." Here you can infer B, no matter which

The phallic symbolism of his plane, The Spirit of St. Louis, is obvious. Lindbergh, in effect, is trapped inside an enormous penis which carries him onwards to an inevitable destination which cannot be changed. Is this how you feel as a director, trapped inside your own masculinity?

but deep down he couldn't tell whether Nigel was joking or not. It was to become an increasingly familiar feeling over the next few years.

Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.

Sounded to me like he had a pretty good idea what he was saying, Van replied, with surprisingly little anger. It's a pity he had to overintellectualize like that. He did such good work, and then he had to go and intellectualize it.

She pondered the arrangements of the paintings on a wall like a writer pondered commas.

Essay's roots are in literature, and literature at its best invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.