Quotes About Interpretation

I've had experiences where I wasn't allowed to change words around at all because you have to say everything, exactly as written on the page. That's not fun for me. For me, part of being an actor is being able to contribute to a character's rhythms. If there's room to explore, you find a happy medium.

Words on the page don't have the same impact as somebody saying the words to you.

I like a lot of modern art. I like Chuck Close a lot. It doesn't necessarily directly influence the work I draw on the page.

I think if an actor is right for a role, casting sees that, and the words that are on the page, depending on how it's written, can really help your character develop.

My sketchbooks are usually just a line on one page or a circle, which to most people must be totally meaningless. But to me, they are very important to the thing I am working on.

Plays are not written but rewritten, and much of the rewriting takes place at the behest of the director, whose job it is to grapple with the myriad complexities of moving a play from the page to the stage.

For me, the bottom line is what's on the page.

Whether it is television or film, the character on the page has to speak to me.

To me, the struggle is to try to make a less-well-written or less-well-rounded character and find who they are. If you really get it, and it's all on the page, then it's really just gonna pop out at you.

What's on the page dictates a lot of what I do. When the words are there, it's easy.

As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.

I think book adaptations, the best one to me is like 'Brokeback Mountain.' Which is a short story, 21 pages, that expands so beautifully into a movie.

Beginning in middle school, the era of wide-margined, Bible-paged anthologies, short stories develop unpromising associations - and these associations often linger through college, when stories become the things distributed in Xeroxes missing entire pages of line-endings.

'Nicholas Nickleby' is 800 pages long. At one time, the theater production was 15 hours long. So it's an interesting process, about what you leave out and what you select.

Half of the great comedians I've had in my shows and that I paid a lot of money to and who made my customers shriek were not only not funny to me, but I couldn't understand why they were funny to anybody.

If you're a model, you're paid to be a muse.

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

What I love to do is paint people's faces, y'know, their eyes. Because you want to find that emotion, see what's going on behind their eyes.

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldn't have to paint at all.

I paint what I see, not what a camera would see.

When I write music, these colors pop out of me. It's hard to describe, but basically when I write music, I paint, and I add colors, and I add notes.

But I'm the only one who can paint the moon, because I'm the only one who knows whether that's right or not.

Why do writers, say, give up a job in economics and decide to write poetry? Or, why do they give up a job in a bank and decide to paint, like Krishan Khanna? They want to convey something.