Quotes About Interpretation

For me personally, I'm anti-gun and always have been and always will be. But I'm definitely not someone who is looking to abolish the Second Amendment. I think we're definitely interpreting it wrong.

The big secret in acting is listening to people.

No matter what happens to us in life, we tend to think of it as 'good' or 'bad.' And most of us tend to use the 'bad' label three to 10 times as often as the 'good' label. And when we say something is bad, the odds grow overwhelming that we will experience it as such.

Whether they know it or not, most American playgoers owe an incalculably great debt to translators. Were it not for their work, comparatively few of us would be able to enjoy the plays of Chekhov, Ibsen or Moliere.

'Barton Fink' owed something to Roman Polanski. As a director, he always goes beyond the obvious narrative drift.

Who has ownership over stories these days?

It's the ownership of what's off that's the beauty in art. Its not about being exactly perfect.

To have a sense of contemporary ownership of Shakespeare is the most important thing to his work.

The last thing a director needs is an actress who feels an ownership towards a particular character.

I guess, as an actor, you have to bring something personal to the character - you've got to identify and love one element of the character, or else you can't really inhabit and find ownership.

I don't know if a historian or scholar owns an opinion.

It was a long time before I understood what the word 'specific' was. I remember being a kid and thinking it was 'pacific,' and being like, 'Can you be more pacific?' And I believed that for maybe five, six years until someone was like, 'It's 'specific.''

In general, I don't really think too much about pacing, myself. You kind of look at each script and what each script demands.

Once you're directing, you're kind of in a certain mode, where you're taking whatever is on the page and forming it into the film that you think it might want to be. So whether it's my writing or not, I still try to work with it in the same way.

The flaw of an amateur is to assume what's in our head is what's on the page.

I'm not a critic. I'm an actor. I see the role I get given on the page. I try to bring it to life as best as I can.

Any time you read a book and get attached to the characters, to me it's always a shock when it goes from page to screen and it's not exactly what was in my head or what I was imagining it should be.

Lots of movies don't kind of work as well as they do on the page.

I like acting for myself as a director. I act and I know that I'll have a chance to have some say in what gets used and that I'll be able to give myself enough takes and be on the same page as myself about how the scene should play.

One must go for a film with an open mind; a film best impacts you when your mind is a blank page to the film.

It's just a matter of me opening up the page and whatever is written on the page, that's what I'm here to do.

The writer creates the role on the page and then the actor takes it and makes it their own.

Sometimes when you write something on the page, it can seem very funny, but when you act it out - and this happens to me a lot, actually - the melancholy of the situation becomes more front and center.

When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.