Quotes About Interpretation

John Woo is a very nice and kind person; he gives almost no direction at all, trusting me to come up with the character. But when I think of him, I think of explosions!

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

A bad historian is even more dangerous than dead documentary wood.

One bites into the brass mouthpiece of his wooden cudgel, and the other blows his cheeks out on a French horn. Do you call that Art?

I feel like everything you learn as an actor growing up is wrong. You're supposed to hit your mark, find your light and know your lines. Those are all things that just make things wooden, dull and boring.

It's a fine line. If you withhold too much, you come across as wooden - as I've often been described in some movies. Fair enough. I believe that the best performances are the ones that an audience has to search for.

A great war shall burst forth from fishes of steel. Machines of flying fire, lobsters, grasshoppers, mosquitoes. The mass attacks shall be repulsed in the woods, when no child in Germany shall obey any longer.

Look at 'Marienbad' honestly. What is it? It is just another talking radio show with pictures. Nobody acts. People stand around while the author talks about the woodwork.

It seems that our politicians see the world in black and white, so why not our artists? Did Woody Allen's 'Manhattan' have to be in black and white? No. But is it fantastic that it was? To see New York like that? Yes!

A lot of Woody Guthrie's songs were taken from other songs. He would rework the melody and lyrics, and all of a sudden it was a Woody Guthrie song.

Woody says I can make jokes, but I don't get them - I'm always looking deeper for the meanings.

Very few people have actually read Freud, but everyone seems prepared to talk about him in that Woody Allen way. To read Freud is not as much fun.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'

Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.

The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.

I find Shakespeare terrifying. When Simon Russell Beale does a speech, I understand every word of it, but if I did the same speech, people would be going, 'Huh? What?'

I can speak a little bit of Hindi but understand every word.

We are not just bundles of atoms being pushed around. But, there's something spiritual about us whether we give that a religious interpretation or not. And so, it's that sense of there being dignity to life that I associate with the word God. I mean, that's probably a pretty radical and agnostic way of interpreting it. But, that's what I think.

According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.

I sing in languages that I speak. So when I'm singing a Schubert song, I know precisely what every word means and, you know, when it was composed and who was the poet and all of that and whether Strauss or Wagner or French Belioz, Duparc or Debussy or whatever.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

Don't use that foreign word 'ideals.' We have that excellent native word 'lies.'

Systematic theology - be careful how you tie down the Word to fit your set and final creeds, systems, dogmas, and organized theistic philosophies! The Word of God is not bound! It's free to say what it will to the individual, and no one can outline it into dispensations which cannot be broken.

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.