Quotes About Interpretation

I can understand that there are those who can think and imagine the world without words, but I think that once you find the words that name your experience, then suddenly that experience becomes grounded, and you can use it and you can try to understand it.

We play a hip-hop song and suddenly 25 people on the left jump up and put their hands in the air; then you play Lost Cause and they're like, I don't know about this one.

I think it's no coincidence that people who are good at writing far-out fiction are also good at meta-fiction. Think of all the best Phillip K. Dick stories, where you experience a sort of dislocation, and suddenly what you think you've been reading is, in fact, something else entirely.

It took me a long time to film the plastic bag, and then I had to get the cut of the scene right. But if you find it as beautiful as the character does, then suddenly it becomes a different movie, and so did he as a character.

My family didn't film anything. But then you look deeper and realize, maybe there are photographs, there are things. It's also context: You give something a context, and suddenly it becomes really deep or meaningful footage.

I became, suddenly, not just a Muslim in faith. I became a Muslim in politics. Somebody whose politics were pre-defined by one interpretation of Islam.

When you use a sample in a big way, when you loop something in the way I did with 'Runaround Sue,' it's like you have your chords and your melody and the quality of the song right there before you add your own production. It's like the song is already made, in a sense.

I think I learned very quickly after I started putting out music... you just learn that people are going to take what they want and make it fit their agenda or make it fit their interpretation. And you make peace with that or you suffer forever.

Songs suffer at the mercy of the performer.

A filmmaker doesn't have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand it. You don't have to die to shoot a death scene.

I have always been interested in how you can depict suffering without being heavy-handed.

For one thing, I don't think art needs to be about suffering; sometimes it really seems like it's only the art about pain that is interpreted as profound, and in my work for years I've really tried to deal with subjects that are substantial, not just fluffy, but presented in a more playful, approachable kind of way.

Every administration suffers its share of 'what the president meant to say' moments.

If you ask three people what it means to be Christian, you will get three different answers. Some feel being baptized is sufficient. Others feel you must accept the Bible as immutable historical fact. Still others require a belief that all those who do not accept Christ as their personal savior are doomed to hell.

Over emphatic negatives always suggest that what is being denied may be what is really being asserted.

My own position is, that it is largely up to the work itself to suggest the nature of these referential points without dimensions in and through the processes by which the distance between them is maintained.

The fiction writer in me likes gaps in stories because I can jump into that gap and try to suggest something.

If you can read the world as a construct, you can ask questions of the construct, and you can suggest ways to change the construct.

I believe in carrying all the looks that are suggested to me in my very own way.

It's amazing to see things that are suggested in the book fully developed and so brilliantly realized through the artistry of the designers.

Character and story are suggested by the voice in the words themselves.

Acting is suggesting, the art lies in leaving room for the audience to identify.

I let the audience use their imaginations. Can I help it if they misconstrue my suggestions?

President Obama seems to understand the Constitution as a 'set of suggestions.'