Quotes About Interpretation

And the curious thing was that Dr Weis had never met anyone, man or woman, friend or colleague, who could stand literature when not on the page.

And the curious thing was that Dr Weiss had never met anyone, man or woman, friend or colleague, who could stand literature when not on the page.

But books, she had found, were too powerful, and invariably misleading.

Reality is merely one-tenth visible section of the iceberg that one sees above the surface of the ocean - art remaining nine-tenths of it that lies below the surface. That is why it is more near Truth than Reality itself. Art does not merely reflect Reality - it enlarges it.

Is imagination dependent upon experience, or is experience influenced by imagination?

Reading centers on finding yourself in a book. -- Sherman Alexie

It took me years and years to realize a very simple thing, which is that when you write fiction you're raising questions, and a lot of people think you're playing a little game with them and that actually you know the answers to the questions. They read your question. They don't know how to answer correctly. And they think that if they could only meet you personally and look into your eyes, you could give them the answers.

He was a man who'd turned his personal likes and dislikes into a moral code; because he didn't enjoy spending money in the Woodyard cafe, there was something morally suspect about the people who did. The Brethren had been much the same. Matthew thought they'd created a God in their own image, hard, cold and inflexible.

When conservative judges strike down laws, it's because of what's in the Constitution. When liberal judges strike down laws (or impose new laws), it's because of what's in the New York Times

Once we start hitting lyrical themes that can whack you from all these different perspectives, we know we're onto something special.

When you're choosing furniture for your home that's supposed to express who you are, what you are also saying is you want other people to infer what you want them to infer. What if they see something different? Wouldn't it be really depressing if you're trying to be bohemian and instead they see you as Rush Limbaugh?

If you're playing the character, you could say to yourself in 16 different ways, What if that didn't bother me? What if I knew exactly what he was talking about? What if I didn't get excited?

I love auditioning. Since 'The Notebook' and 'Wedding Crashers,' I don't have to audition anymore, and I miss it. You get to show your interpretation of the character. I get nervous when I don't audition. What if they hate what I want to do?

What, if not Shakespeare, is open for interpretation?

I've done quite a few films that are based on books, and it's always nerve-wracking because there's an audience who has read and loved the book, and what if they see the movie and hate it?

Whatever is received is received according to the nature of the recipient.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

I'm doing the shows. The stage is my canvas; I'll put whatever up there for the visible eye.

I can sing 'Happy Birthday' to you in twelve different places, but one of them is going to make you feel a certain thing, maybe it's a vulnerability, maybe an innocence, maybe another way is sexy and soulful or bluesy whatever it is, but with singers, exploring keys, I think, is important.

People read informality as, 'Do whatever you feel like,' and whatever you feel like might be disastrous.

I feel that as artists - whatever your medium is - I feel that we're watching what goes on around us and we take what we don't see, or we don't hear, or we don't feel and we do something that speaks of it; more about it, for it, or against it - whatever our perspective is - that's what our job is.

I like to make little movies or fake stories about something that happened in my life. I will make a movie in my mind that would translate the same feeling or emotion that I had in whatever just happened.

Acting, to me, has been many things: It's a business, and it's a craft, and it's a political act - it's whatever adjective is most applicable.

I realized that you could formulate theories about human and social phenomena in language and pictures and whatever you wanted on the computer, and you didn't have to go through this straitjacket, adding a lot of numbers.