Quotes About Interpretation

My gift, if that's not too grandiose a term, is one for describing novels, biographies, and works of history in such a way that people want to read them.

We're so used to using military terminology in civilian speech that we forget those terms might mean something very specific.

We are concerned with the relationship between art and life. Contemporary art is only intelligible in terms of its relationship to our life.

I usually talk about clothes in terms of a story rather than a colour.

I've had a fair amount of experience with snakes, and I find them to be pretty honest in terms of how you read their body language and emotions. They'll tell you when they're grumpy. They'll tell you when they're okay.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.

You can have the greatest player in terms of mastering an instrument and you could be yawning your head off when you hear them. So, it's not what you do, but the way you're doing it and in the end that's all that we have.

The idea of 'advice,' in terms of telling people advice or asking people for advice, has become not comprehensible to me, to a certain degree, due to feeling, like, for something to be accurately defined as 'good' or 'bad,' I would want to know the context, goal, perspective for it.

Conservatives like to insist that their judges are strict constructionists, giving the Constitution and statutes their precise meaning and no more, while judges like Ms. Sotomayor are activists. But there is no magic right way to interpret terms like 'free speech' or 'due process' - or potato chip.

I'm thinking in terms of a point of departure, a field of action for performers to express an expressive need of mine which hopefully the context of music would convey.

I loved that these two guys argued with each other as if movies actually mattered. Nobody I knew talked about movies that way, but Siskel and Ebert took each movie as it came and talked about whether it was a success on its own terms.

I'm probably an actor that tends to, instead of putting things on, think about it more in terms of taking away what's not in the character, until I'm left with what is. If that makes sense. That's probably a particularly American way of working, but maybe not. The end of any movie is a readjustment.

I think when somebody's painting they don't necessarily... I'm not illustrating what I know. I'm mapping out, like topographically, some terrain I am satisfied with, how awkward that mark is.

The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case.

I think that if you get too close to the character, if you do too much historical research, you may find yourself defending your view of a character against the author's view, and I think that's terribly dangerous.

That's the joy of acting, to bring something to it. That's what makes acting exciting. Just saying lines is not terribly exciting.

I think recordings have been a terrific advance because now, when you have a piece of music, particularly something that appears to the listener very complicated, there's really a push to the world to try to figure out what it was that he was hearing.

I don't expect to be another Walt Disney, but I do get a terrific bang out of being able to say things with pictures. Maybe that means something deep and profound about me - but I doubt it.

When a movie is being made out of a book, there is a mixed reaction on the part of fans because they are both extremely excited and they are also terrified. 'They are going to take my story, and they are going to mess it up; they are going to ruin it; they're going to do this; they're going to do that.'

If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.

What the art world has done, it has been constantly been pushing the boundaries about what art can be. It's like expanding its territory.

I don't think I'm an intentional liar, but I'm a little bit of an exaggerator sometimes. If I'm exaggerating, and the journalist exaggerates on top of that, then we end up in funny territory.

We're invited to believe that the worst effects of Stalinism arose from its 'dogmatic' intransigence; but it is precisely because so much was left open to interpretation that its Terror was so pervasive.