Quotes About Interpretation

I like to interpret 'Call me a River', as if I'm saying, 'Now you're telling me you love me after all that, and I'm telling you to shove off.' That's my interpretation. But I would never 'say' that because somebody else might interpret the song in another way.

We are not the originators of the story. I think it's actually the opposite when you're an actor. You're telling somebody else's story.

Telling the truth to people who misunderstand you is generally promoting a falsehood, isn't it?

You can be very honest without telling the truth, at least in art.

A friend of mine tells that I talk in shorthand and then smudge it.

I've listened to music all my life. I've always felt that music tells more stories sometimes than films, with more possibilities. Every time you listen to them, songs bring different images and moods - depending on where you are in your life, you can listen to a song, and it means something different.

Some people start with the lyrics first because they know what they want to talk about and they just write a whole bunch of lyrical ideas, but for me the music tells me what to talk about.

We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories, our memory tells us stories. That is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.

Paul Riser tells it in an interesting way; he dissects it and tells the structure, you know, 'you don't mention that part here.' But that's what's interesting about it and the people who are absent are interesting too.

I believe every room speaks, tells you what to do to it. You have to listen to that.

You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.

It is a barren kind of criticism which tells you what a thing is not.

The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles.

The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.

I'd rather let the fiction speak for itself and I don't want to write fiction that tells people how to feel, and I don't want to be judgmental in the fiction.

Comedians take a neat situation and turn it into a mess. And in my books I do the same thing, but it's the other way around. I like to mess around with mess. A mess is only a mess because someone tells you it is.

Most theater tells you what to think.

What could be more boring than a novel that tells you how to think about everything that happens in it?

I'm not like other writers. I'm not hung up on using my own songs. In fact, my sister Bunny always tells me I sing other people's songs better than my own. She says I loosen up and give the songs a different feel.

We've all had that experience where we hear a song that we've liked for many years, and we finally hear what the writer tells us what it's about, and you're often disappointed.

A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction.

Life usually tells the best stories - but sometimes it takes an artist to show us what they mean.

It's exhilarating to read something that tells you that people saw something and felt something that you thought was so discreet. When they relate you to some of their own fantasies of who or how some actresses should be in movies. That's really kind of sweet!

Film is a living, breathing thing. It's very delicate, and you have to listen and watch for what it tells you.