Quotes About Interpretation

In Western dream interpretation, it's often connected to psychotherapy and looking at the personality and what's going on in your life. In Eastern dream telling, many times there's this idea of a special gift. And without this gift, you could study and study, but you'd never really become an effective dream teller.

In the olden days, I believe Mozart also improvised on piano, but somehow in the last 200 years, the whole training of Western classical music - they don't read between the lines, they just read the lines.

Just because it's got a gun doesn't make it a crime novel, and just because there's a horse doesn't make it a western.

My brother had a house in Paris. To it came many Western classical musicians. These musicians all made the same point: 'Indian music,' they said, 'is beautiful when we hear it with the dancers. On its own, it is repetitious and monotonous.'

If you do a Western that's funny, there's no way people don't call it a spoof or a parody, even though it may not be.

The Western poet and writer of romance has exactly the same kind of difficulty in comprehending Eastern subjects as you have in comprehending Western subjects.

I'm of the Samuel Goldwyn school of writing: If you need to send a message, call Western Union. Any messages people take away from my books are the ones they see in them.

If you look at how people use the term 'western,' you can only conclude that it means a movie that has big hats and horses. And if you really want to sound like you've been thinking, then you'll use a term like 'genre.' But all the hell it seems to mean is big hats and horses. Which is not all that deeply analytical.

I myself saw the great works of Western civilization for the first time in my high school in Lithuania in bad black-and-white reproductions on miserable paper. That was, for many years, what art was for me. But from those miserable black-and-white reproductions, I got something, something unmistakable.

As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers.

When you're doing a play, you don't always have a practical world that you're working off of. You have to create it for yourself.

If you want to practice Islam in the inconsequential, semi-secular sense, fine.

During my years as a practicing lawyer, it just was part of your study of what Congress was trying to say in their statutes. I never really considered judges or scholars as either those who used legislative history or those who were opposed to it until after I got on the court.

Writing about prayer to a secular audience is tap-dancing on the radio. I want to say, 'Gee whiz, isn't this great,' and have everyone's head cocked like the RCA dog.

I will preach with my brush.

I'm a big believer in,'If anyone can understand my politics, I've failed.' If you can get a sense of which side of the fence I'm on, then I'm not doing a service. I'm preaching, and that's not my job.

I try not to be someone who's preaching a message with my films or anything like that.

The world looks at preachers out of church to know what they mean in it.

Writers, directors often can get too precious with their words.

I don't think Stoppardian has a precise definition.

Guy Pearce is very precise and clear about understanding the rhythm and the music of a scene.

Everything I've written I see in a very precise way and I hear in my inner ear.

A good autobiography is like a document: a mirror of the age on which people can 'depend.' In a novel, by contrast, it's not the facts that matter, but precisely what you add to the facts.

I always enjoy ballet when you can read the situation very precisely, when I could tell you exactly which sentence that person is saying to that person even when they're not speaking and just moving their hand.