Quotes About Interpretation

The reader has to be creative when he's reading. He has to try to make the thing alive. A good reader has to do a certain amount of work when he is reading.

With comics, you've got to develop some kind of shorthand. You can't make every drawing look like a detailed etching. The average reader actually doesn't want all that detail; it interferes with the flow of the reading process.

There's always an anxiety about playing literary characters because one of the great joys of reading books is that you can create your own vision of things.

But I honestly don't read critics. My dad reads absolutely everything ever written about me. He calls me up to read ecstatic reviews, but I always insist that I can't hear them. If you give value to the good reviews, you have to give value to the criticism.

You make a movie, and if somebody reads something into it, then great, more power to him.

Honestly, if anyone reads my work, they're doing me a favor, so they get to use whatever words they want to describe it. I can't control that, nor if they like the work, so best not to even try.

If anybody reads a story in a magazine or book, different pictures compete in their minds.

If the book is a mystery to its author as she's writing, inevitably it's going to be a mystery to the reader as he or she reads it.

I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.

I think 'Beasts of No Nation' is a novel that hopefully will affect each person who reads it in a different way.

Some actors come to the set ready to do their parts a certain way.

The curious thing about the Ready-Made is that I've never been able to arrive at a definition or explanation that fully satisfies me. There's still magic in the idea, so I'd rather keep it that way than try to be exoteric about it.

Cartoons are not real drawings, because they are drawings intended to be read.

I feel any actor can deliver a dialogue but real acting is how one reacts to the dialogue.

Successful fiction does not need to be validated by 'real life'; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is 'real'.

I don't want real life necessarily to be seen only as a context to heighten the deepness my work.

I should tell you that many people think that authors just cut and paste from real life into books. It doesn't work quite that way.

What I've really liked doing is combining what you might call art criticism or music criticism with something that is happening in real life.

Projection of sound gives the stage a life different from real life. As actors and interpretive artists, we must not only be able to know the attitude of the script, we must also make ourselves heard - without amplification.

I always talk about my characters like they're real people.

Each movie you do about a real person is like a painting, and you choose certain things in the painting that you want to pull out and you want to show.

When you're playing a real person, there's a balance between playing the person in the script and playing the person as he was in life. You have to be respectful and true to who that person was, but at the same time tell the story in the film.

Playing a real person, it does add an extra level of thoughtfulness. You're portraying someone who actually existed, so instead of saying, like, 'OK, I think this would make the scene better,' it's more a question of, 'What do I think the real Jeffrey Dahmer would do?'

I can't see much purpose in archaeology unless you can find out the narrative about that place, or even realise that nobody actually knows what the narrative was.