Quotes About Interpretation

Artists need some kind of stimulating experience a lot of times, which crystallizes when you sing about it or paint it or sculpt it. You literally mold the experience the way you want. It's therapy.

I hate the analyzing thing. People say, 'Why do you think your character did that? I don't know. I'm not an analyst, and they're not in psychotherapy. Unless it's a film where they're in therapy.

I've always tried to avoid music being direct therapy, and I've always found there's a power when you write something that can have its own interpretation - although I'm not being intentionally evasive.

In common use almost every word has many shades of meaning, and therefore needs to be interpreted by the context.

Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

How we think about the world and - perhaps even more importantly - how we narrate it have a massive significance, therefore, a thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes.

Acting and performing music is exactly the same. Therefore, an actor, for instance, who is very impressive, he's not simply imitating or trying to imitate, but he must dominate this kind of feeling, and then he transmits it in a much stronger way.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis.

The best movies have one sentence that they're exploring, a thesis, something that people can argue about over dinner afterward.

My central thesis is that combining increased temporal and spatial resolution in MRI techniques with increasingly powerful data correlation techniques will allow the derivation of interpreted meanings from neural signals. I observed, further, that the techniques that exist already allow some correlations.

I tend to stare at people and memorize what they're saying and how they say it.

With singing, the name of the game is to make yourself believable. When somebody hears you sing a song, and they say, 'Oh, that must have happened to him,' that's when you know you're transmitting. It's like being a good actor. You make people feel things, emotions and what not.

When I learned Japanese, they say that I sounded like a Chinese with diarrhea!

We just want Jews to be perfected, as they say. That is what Christianity is. We believe the Old Testament, but ours is more like Federal Express.

I've played all through the Middle East. The Arabs never say what they mean. They say what they think you want to hear.

You have plausible deniability, as they say in politics, as an author with movies. Because if the movie is terrible, you simply say they failed to catch the genius of the book.

A lot of times when I sit down with the other comics and try to talk theory, they say I'm being too serious.

I've met people who will go to a movie that I can't stand and they say that they saw that movie ten times. There's something they like and identified in that movie, and I don't see it.

Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

I really can't describe what my stand-up is like - people see it and they say it's like that, or it's like this, and that's really up to them, that's fine, but I don't sit around all day analysing it. I just try and enjoy a show and interest myself because if I don't do that then I won't interest anybody else.

There's as much revealed in the way a person lifts a glass as in what they say about some political issue.

If they say they don't like the way I play Beethoven, then I can swallow that, and maybe they're right. But if they don't like what I've written, then it's about me.

I have a personal issue with Shakespeare. When I first encountered him, he made me feel thick. Well, not him, but the productions I saw.