Quotes About Interpretation

I think criticism, or a critical engagement with history, has a good deal to do with a willingness to be fooled.

I don't drive by the seat of my pants and happen to win races. I work very hard to interpret the data and drive a certain way. My engineers have confidence in me, and more often than not, when I tell them what I need or what I am feeling with the car, it's right.

When I would hear the rabbi tell about some miracle such as a bush whose leaves were shaking but there wasn't any wind, I would try to fit the miracle into the real world and explain it in terms of natural phenomena.

What we accepted as great art - whether the book, the script, the painting, the symphony - is that which could be saved and savored. But the performances of the athletic artists who ran and jumped and wrestled were gone with the wind.

There is much modern music that is better adapted to a wind combination than to a string, although for obvious reasons originally scored for an orchestra. If in such cases the interpretation is equal to the composition the balance of a wind combination is more satisfying.

To copy Nature? A boy with a camera can do that. To get the spirit of Nature? A woodman or a shepherd can follow the trail of the whistling wind to hoarded sunshine in distant wolds. But to interpret Nature and inform it with a human personality that rises above it, invokes the divine in it, is the work of genius.

Obviously, something like ballet, you have music, you dance with the music and it's a very direct connection. With visual art, when there's no music that accompanies the art, such as great masterworks in a museum, you wind up interpreting what the artist is doing, how the artist made that work and what they're conveying.

I find little in the works of Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner and others when they are led by a conductor who functions like a windmill.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

Illustrations can be a big window: a looking glass into the author's imagination.

My mother and I could always look out the same window without ever seeing the same thing.

My job as an actor is to cover and expose in varying allowance that - so that the audience can peek through the window to the people I create.

I see the role of the writer as creating a room with big windows and leaving the reader to imagine. It's a meeting on the page.

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine - everybody drinks water.

If talking about arts means being pretentious, a bit like being a wine critic, then I don't feel comfy with that. You can get a lot from paintings without getting mystical about brush strokes.

I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.

Theatre gives you wings as an actor.

I can never wink at the audience.

The way you can see what an actor brings to a role is you turn the sound off. Everything else becomes subtext, the wink and the nod, and the attitude and all that kind of stuff is a little easier to see with the sound off.

People aren't quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They're not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different.

History is not just written by the winners; it's written about them.

The more history I learnt, the less interested I got in winning arguments and the more interested in establishing the truth.

I think that it is important for people to understand that whether a good-guy or a bad-guy wins a case is less important than what the law is that the case results in.