Quotes About Interpretation

I can consider not only great art, but the context in which that art has been created. I can consider the people who paid a price for that art to be created and whether or not I want to appreciate that art on their backs.

One of the things I do take some pride in is that if you had never read an article about my life, if you knew nothing about me, except that my books were being set in front of you to read, and if you were to read those books in sequence, I don't think you would say to yourself, 'Oh my God, something terrible happened to this writer in 1989.'

Films are wonderful but they do fix an identity. I can't read 'Pride and Prejudice' anymore, for instance, without imaging Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy.

In some ways, 'Mansfield Park' is 'Pride and Prejudice' turned inside out.

When I write lyrics for Priest, I'm writing them for Priest. I'm not writing them for me.

Now that we do not have priests and philosophers any more, artists are the most important people in the world.

The reasons why images are so primal and people immediately relate to it is that we are exquisitely engineered to interpret information that is arrayed in two dimensions. That's our eyesight. That's how our eye-brain system works. So it immediately feels to us when we look at an image like we have extended our senses.

The thing is, as a film director, you're essentially alone: You have to tell a story primarily through pictures, and only you know the film you see in your head.

Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.

Art is one of the prime ways we have of opening ourselves and going beyond ourselves. That's what art is: it's the product of the human being in the world and imagination, all coming together.

I would have thought it possible to choose delegates for these larger conferences who, even if they could not speak the principal languages, could at least understand them or could have friends seated beside them who could keep them informed on essential points.

The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance.

In general, I get nervous when I do print interviews because I know that whatever I say is going to be shown through the lens of whomever I'm talking to.

Many of the articles printed over the last few months have ended up painting a picture of me that is more than a little distorted.

We printed all the words out because otherwise nobody would be able to understand them.

Meaning comes from the capacity to see what is not in some simple, objective sense there on the printed page.

We're thinking about printing the lyrics with the next record so that people can find their own meaning in them. But then they would start having a life of their own, and I think the Portishead music should stay a whole in which the lyrics come second, actually.

Prior to being in 'Carousel,' I had only seen the movie. So, when I read the script, I felt like it was a lot deeper than the movie portrayed it to be.

My work is a self-portrait of my mind, a prism of my convictions.

You take what you know, and you put it through your own prism. If I play characters that break down or cry, it's Gary Oldman crying; it's not the character crying.

Men and women understand different things about personal boundaries. What men call privacy, women know as secrecy.

The way one perceives a book and a film are totally different. You read a book in the privacy of your room. You are the boss; you set the pace and rhythm of your reading. In the movie house, you can't do that.

I let people fill in the blanks on their own. If they want to think about their ex, that's fine. If they want to think about maybe who one of my exes is, then that's fine. And it might not be right, because I'm the only one who knows what these songs are really about. It's the one shred of privacy I have in the matter.

As a member of this court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard.