Quotes About Interpretation

When I come up against a director who has a concept that I don't agree with, or maybe I just haven't thought of it or whatever, I'd be more prone to go with them than my own because I want to be out of control as an actor, I want them to have the control, otherwise it's going to become predictably my work, and that's not fun.

I think when you're acting, you usually don't have to know too much beyond how to pronounce the words you're saying.

A mathematical proof is beautiful, but when you're finished, it's really only about one thing. A story can be about many things.

These films however, have ambiguity built into them, because it's too easy in film to make a strident work of propaganda or advertising, which are really the same thing anyway, meaning the message is unmistakable.

It is very easy to make clear what you want a film to say, but I did not wish to engage in overt propaganda, even for the right cause. I wanted to create an experience through the films, something where people could have the freedom of their own response to them.

It is not proper to project our feelings onto things or to attribute our own sensations and passions to them. Can it also be improper to see in them a guide, a way of life?

We've all faced the charge that our novels are history lite, and to some extent, that's true. Yet for some, historical fiction is a way into reading history proper.

When we were writing the 'Stage' album, we realized we'd never really done proper covers, where we were taking songs and making them our own and kind of playing around with them. I came up with the idea of doing a cover of 'Wish You Were Here,' but we didn't really want it on the record.

Knowing how to paint and to use one's colors rightly has not any connection with originality. This originality consists in properly expressing your own impressions.

Human beings, in their present evolved state, have a limited capacity to digest, understand, and then properly and accurately disseminate events and information to other nodes of discourse.

I think my concerns are the same as every actor. Can I find this character and make it come to life properly?

I just watched a James Brown video of him singing 'I Feel Good,' and then I kind of just copied off his moves. But I couldn't do them properly, so they turned into my own moves.

We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is, and the judiciary is the safeguard of our property and our liberty and our property under the Constitution.

You have to take Bible prophecy literally, just like everything else in the Bible.

What are prophecies? Don't we hear them every day of the week? And if one comes true there may be seven blind and come to nothing.

I am not saying we are categorizing Ellen White in the biblical context of a false prophet.

ISIS itself, it draws its central belief system from the Koran and from the writings of the Prophet Muhammad. That is undeniable. And it's a medieval interpretation of it. It is a literal interpretation of it.

The apostolic writings are of three kinds: historical, didactic, and prophetic.

If you are a speechwriter, you have to know what the person you're writing for thinks. A lot of foreign policy advisers are thinking, 'How can I get my proposal into this guy's speech?' I was just thinking, 'What does he want to say?'

Writing is a black-box proposition. You see actors; you can see what they're doing. You can watch the director on set doing his work. But when a studio says to a writer, 'Give us some pages,' he just goes off and comes back. It's just pages, and suddenly, there's some writing on them.

I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.

I think art is communication. To that extent, it can be the words between the words. It has a possibility of communicating something more than people can do with prose or just talking.

Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances.

Every antagonist is a protagonist in his own right.