Quotes About Interpretation

The play is not in the words, it's in you!

Reality does not easily give up meaning; it's the biographer's job to clobber it into submission. You're meant not only to tame it but to extract substance, to identify cause and axiomatic effect. You subsist on the tactical omissions, the hollow words, the oddly unconnected dots.

There are two words for everything.

Hence it happens that one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves.

Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.

Good directors don't answer questions with their work. They generate debate and create discussion.

The qualities I look for in planners or creatives is very much the same thing. Beyond the givens of talent and work ethic, I really look for people who are inspired by the everyday, people who are not afraid of the obvious and are able to reinterpret it into a creative and interesting manner.

I didn't work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No language can be perfect for everyone. I tried to make Ruby perfect for me, but maybe it's not perfect for you. The perfect language for Guido van Rossum is probably Python.

You can write a script, but that's just a starting point as a cartoonist. The heart of the process comes when you start to draw it, and you work out how to lay the page out, how best to tell the story.

One might have thought that 70 years was time enough to work out what really happened in 1939. It isn't the case. Misunderstandings and misinformation abound.

When you write a song you have an idea of how it should be sung but it doesn't work out that way if someone else records it.

I paint German artists whom I admire. I paint their pictures, their work as painters, and their portraits too. But oddly enough, each of these portraits ends up as a picture of a woman with blonde hair. I myself have never been able to work out why this happens.

I don't analyze what I'm doing. I've read convincing interpretations of my work, and sometimes I've noticed something that I wasn't aware of, but I think, at this point, people read into my work out of habit. Or I'm just very, very smart.

A picture can say a thousand words but maybe not the correct ones.

Sometimes people say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so if you look at my tattoos and you know what you're reading, you can draw a lot from them.

I know pictures say a thousand words, but they also don't say millions of other words that need to be said.

For more than three thousand years men have quarreled concerning the formulas of their faith.

I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.

I get thousands of letters, and they give me a feeling of how each book is perceived. Often I think I have written about a certain theme, but by reading the letters or reviews, I realise that everybody sees the book differently.

How many different works of art have been inspired by 'Don Quixote?' Thousands. Most people enter the novel, for better or worse, through the musical the 'Man Of La Mancha.'

For thousands of years, men have written history, so it seems to me that most of what we've read is from the male point of view.

For thousands of years, we've insisted that art can make us better people. Unless a brief can be fashioned that, by its very nature, art appeals only to the best in people and never the darkness, which defies both logic and intuition, then we have to acknowledge that art can make some of us worse.

My approach has never been to start from theories to arrive at facts, but on the contrary, to try to bring out from the facts the explanatory thread without which they appear incomprehensible and elude effective action.

I love the fact that James Ivory made films about Britain, made 'Howards End' and 'The Remains of the Day,' or that Paul Thomas Anderson made 'Phantom Thread.' They're about Britishness, but they're from an American perspective. And I actually think they're fantastic in the way that they understand Britishness.