Quotes About Interpretation

History teaches us, in no mistaken language, how often customs and practices, which were originated without lawful warrant, and opposed to the sound construction of the law, have come to overload and pervert it, as commentators on the text of Holy Scripture have established doctrines wholly at variance with its true spirit.

The actor depends wholly on himself. He gives his performance in what, to him, seems the most effective manner.

The best translations cannot convey to us the strength and exquisite delicacy of thought in its native garb, and he to whom such books are shut flounders about in outer darkness.

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.

That is why the analogy of stealing does not work. With a thief, we want to know how much money he stole, and from whom. With the artist it is not how much he took and from whom, but what he did with it.

And some poets are far better read off the page because they're very bad speakers. I'm thinking of one in particular whom I won't name, a good poet, and he reads in such a dry, boring way, your eyes start drooping.

I strongly suggest that we play down basics like who influenced whom, and instead study the way the influence is transformed, in other words: how the artist made it his own.

I think all great actors - and I don't classify myself as one of them, incidentally - but I think all great actors listen well and I've learned that from a lot of the very good actors with whom I've worked - to really listen to what people say.

Somebody said to me that I speak English almost like somebody for whom English is not their first language.

Journalism: A profession whose business is to explain to others what it personally does not understand.

If you think about Shakespeare, you remember Richard III and Macbeth before you remember Ferdinand, whose role is just to fall in love and be a bit of a wimp. I love the baddies. More important, though, is making the baddies somehow, weirdly, understood.

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

It's also possible to have two third person singular points of view, as represented by two characters through whose eyes the story is told in alternating chapters, say.

When I was living in China, I learned to make things hyper-explicit because often they were being read by people whose command of English kept them from picking up what I thought were obvious signals.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

I like it when one is not certain what one sees. When we do not know why the photographer has taken a picture and when we do not know why we are looking at it, all of a sudden we discover something that we start seeing. I like this confusion.

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.

When I hear 'fusion,' I think of Tricky-Dick stuff - really hairy melodies played in unison. It's like, 'Why?'

I should like to know if, taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, you begin making exceptions to it, where will you stop? If one man says it does not mean a Negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man?

One of the problems with compromise in one area of Scripture is where do you stop compromising? If Christians accept the idea of human evolution, then why not accept the idea that our sinful tendencies are really just evolved tendencies?

Not only was it enough to be a cover band, it was perhaps the highest calling. After all, if you could play music recorded by others, stay true to the original, and still add fire and flare, why not?

Once or twice, I've taken the Gideon Bible out of the drawer, opened it at random, and found myself stuck in the middle of a genealogical list. And that's when I thought: why not cherry-pick the best bits, passages that people can actually use?

Guerillas' uses a snippet of 'Procreation of the Wicked' by Celtic Frost because I always loved that song.

The wide and unregulated power of contempt given to the courts has been deliberately interpreted by the courts in a manner which has served to intimidate the media from exposing corruption and misbehaviour by the courts and judges.