Quotes About Interpretation

They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that dislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.

I really prize and love great painting.

I can think of nothing that an audience won't understand. The only problem is to interest them; once they are interested, they understand anything in the world.

In Afghanistan, this is the problem, because everybody holds a piece of that mirror, and they all look at it and claim that they hold the entire truth.

I will always find a defense for characters, and that's why it's fun playing characters that are morally ambiguous, or are at least perceived superficially as being problematic.

People believe that criticism should be objective, whatever that means, but I really don't understand what people mean by that. I guess if you're doing sonata-allegro procedure analysis, you can be objective for a page or two. But in pop? Really hard.

A friend once asked me what comedy was. That floored me. What is comedy? I don't know. Does anybody? Can you define it? All I know is that I learned how to get laughs, and that's all I know about it. You have to learn what people will laugh at, then proceed accordingly.

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

Actors have their own processes, and if you want to be respectful of their process, you've got to communicate with them in the language of their process, and keeping that all straight is a little bit of a head-scratcher.

We then need to consider carefully how the E.U. law that is going to be imported into our own law will operate. Its processes and interpretation have always been different from our own domestic law.

There has always been a hermeneutic problem in Christianity because Christianity proceeds from a proclamation.

A mere copier of nature can never produce anything great.

When you produce and direct, your movies are different to you. They're not just something you act in.

It's no fun for me to cover a song and produce it the exact same way as it already exists. When I hear that happening, I have to say, 'What's the point?'

As an actor, you're listening to the other person and always trying to be present and take everything they're giving you, but when they're not there, you have to produce that yourself.

Two of the first plays I saw after I arrived in Britain were 'King Lear' in Liverpool, and 'Antony and Cleopatra' at Stratford. One was produced with hardly a backdrop and the other with gigantic scene changes. I was impressed by what connected the two: the words and their life beyond the stage.

I'm no Robert Christgau or Chuck Klosterman, but I would say that Landlady is like if Harry Nilsson was produced by Brian Eno. Or, if David Byrne fronted Wilco. Those are my two hoity-toity musical epigrams.

Any part I do is a marriage of the words - what the playwright or producer or show runner's vision is - to how I would play it. It took me a while to get rid of 'Oh, they want it this way, so I'm going to do it how they want it.'

It's understanding the intention of a composer that allows a producer and an arranger to make those moments speak.

I am more a friend of art than a producer of painting.

Part of the job of being a producer is the Vulcan mind meld, where you listen not to what they're saying but what they mean.

Whether you're an actor, producer, writer, or director, it's all about the story you're going to tell.

The producers probably won't like this, but I always describe her as Peppermint Patty on acid.

It's not very often that you get to come up with ideas and bring your take on the character and then actually have writers, producers, and directors pay attention to it.