Quotes About Interpretation

I am certainly not arguing for the de facto autonomy of the individual work, even though there is much to be said for making the attempt to see it in that light as one facet of the reception process.

The thing with food is that you can give 20 people the same recipe and the same ingredients, and somebody's going to make it better than somebody else, and that's the creativity of it. It's like music. You could have a bunch of people playing the same piece, and somebody's gonna play it better.

I'm not a writer myself, so I'm forced to try to get what's a sort of an odour or a colour or something I feel in my head from a writer, and that's a... I don't have a recipe for that process. I don't know what it is... it's different every time.

Being extremely honest is quite funny. But there's no recipe or concept that I can bring up that fully defines what we find humorous. It's instinctive.

You don't have to follow every recipe to the letter.

An awful lot of people think it's easy to lift recipes out.

You can't be a passive recipient of images, you have to engage with images and read their subtexts. These are critical things that will be taught to the students by a film club.

I may play the same program from one recital to the next, but I will play it differently, and because it is always different, it is always new.

If you can read, then you can recite Shakespeare. But that's not acting.

Bizarrely, our English word 'sturdy' may go back to the Latin turdus, thrush. Anyone described as 'sturdy' in the 1200s was wilfully reckless and possibly as immovable as a sozzled bird.

I've no idea what they make of me. People usually don't recognise themselves in an impression.

I'll reshoot a corridor 13 different ways, and you'll never recognise them.

History is, of course, a made thing. It does not exist by itself in anything like a recognizable form.

A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it?

You would have to be born with a gene that doesn't allow you to recognize sarcasm if you take anything I say seriously.

I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.

Ordinary language carries with it conditions of meaning which it is easy to recognize by classifying the contexts in which the expression is employed in a meaningful manner.

What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it.

When art dresses in worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art.

Caesar recognized the omens, but he didn't believe they applied to him.

When you go back and look at what people say about my essays, they're always going, 'What is this?' Because they're not exactly like other people's essays... The approach is not at all the recognized approach of a non-fiction writer. It's not linear. It isn't pyramidally based on fact.

The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.

A jurist can obey the letter of the law and violate its spirit, or it can follow the spirit of the law and violate the letter of the law. I want someone who can reconcile the letter and the spirit of the law without partisan leanings.

People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he's ever read, and another person will say it's absolutely idiotic. I mean, there's no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.