Quotes About Interpretation

I'm an immigrant writer, or an African writer, or an Ethiopian-American writer, and occasionally an American writer according to the whims and needs of my interpreters.

One person's roar is another's whine, just as one person's music is another's unendurable noise.

I just can't whip off a likeness of somebody.

I wouldn't call him a slave. I don't whip him when he does something wrong. Just when he does something good.

For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.

If I hear an interesting turn of phrase on TV, I'll repeat it back - I just like to roll it around on my tongue. The same goes for dialog: I'll either speak it aloud or whisper it. I definitely sit in front of my computer and mutter. People have mentioned it.

Darren Aronofsky is on another level. You get lost in a scene, and he'll come over and whisper something in your ear, and suddenly everything makes sense.

He seems determined to make a trumpet sound like a tin whistle.

I think dissonance in music makes you think. It isn't, 'Oh, that's a pretty melody I can whistle.' You have to sit down and listen to tell it apart from other things.

There's so much grey to every story - nothing is so black and white.

Although humans see reality in colour, for me, black and white has always been connected to the image's deeper truth, to its most hidden meaning.

Both read the Bible day and night, but thou read black where I read white.

Even drawing gray hair at all is difficult to render in black and white.

Whenever someone like a plumber or a mechanic tries to explain something technical to me, I listen for about three seconds before it all just becomes white noise, like Charlie Brown's teacher.

Law in Ukraine is not black and white; it is shades of gray.

I'm not a monster; I'm a white rabbit.

It's unfortunate that in an interview sometimes things can seem so black and white.

We're about to shoot an episode on Air Force One, for instance, and we're going to take liberties, small liberties, with Air Force One, as we take small liberties with our White House set.

Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

Once I started writing the screenplay of 'Bride & Prejudice,' I was convinced Jane Austen was a Punjabi in her previous birth.

The works of previous artists have come from their own experiences or insights but haven't given the experience itself. They had set themselves up as a sort of interpreter to the layman... Our interest is in a form where you realize that the media are just perception.

Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.

Avoid miscommunication. The price you pay for it is horrendous.

What is and isn't justified by military necessity is, naturally, open to interpretation. One of the key concepts, though, is the law of proportionality. A military attack that results in civilian casualties - 'collateral damage' - is acceptable as long as the military benefits outweigh the price that is paid by humanity.