Quotes About Interpretation

It ain't nothin' till I call it.

It cannot be precisely known how any thing is good or bad, till it is precisely known what it is.

But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it.

A lot of the fun lies in trying to penetrate the mystery; and this is best done by saying over the lines to yourself again and again, till they pass through the stage of sounding like nonsense, and finally return to a full sense that had at first escaped notice.

I like to leave a film open-ended, with a lingering feeling. I'll not do sequels of any of my films till I have subjects to explore.

With Prabhu Deva, you have to fulfil his exact vision. Till then, he will not be satisfied, because his film has his vision and he will make it only in that way.

What Tim does is, he calls me and sends me the script. And then he sends me a drawing, an illustration of his image of me as the character. It's so great.

I recently got into 'Lie to Me' with Tim Roth and 'The Mentalist.'

A painting lets us know how somebody literally saw things. A piece of music is another language that transmits a whole wealth of emotion and wordless experience. But writing is special in the way at allows us to temporarily enter another person's world, to step outside the boundaries of our own time and space.

I think that films or indeed any art work should be made in a way that they are infinitely viewable; so that you could go back to it time and time again, not necessarily immediately but over a space of time, and see new things in it, or new ways of looking at it.

One of the challenges obviously with doing an accent from a time period early in history is that there aren't recordings. You would never really get the opportunity to hear exactly what you were shooting for.

Often, when you look at history, at least through the lens that many of us have looked at history - high school and college courses - a lot of the color gets bled out of it. You're left with a time period that does not look as strange and irrational as the time you're actually living through.

The value of writing about art is its effect on the imagination. Paintings allow us to inhabit another culture, place, and time period, and address the issues of those time periods that resonate with our own time.

I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.

Painting becomes interesting when it becomes timeless.

Actors should be timeless and impersonal.

I definitely don't aspire to writing that's 'timeless,' whatever that means.

We knew in our gut that History needed to be more than a timeline.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

You know, I don't talk about the characters that I play. Years ago, I was a little timid about it and I kind of squirmed when I was asked, 'Could you tell us something about your character.' Now with a little self-confidence that comes with the grey beard, I just flatly refuse.

You can time a part perfectly and play it badly. And some people have very individual offbeat timing, which is their own. It works simply because they are who they are.

There's timing in drama. You have to have a sense of rhythm. But the real thing that lends yourself to drama as opposed to comedy is a sense from the audience of whether there's more to it than you can see.

Everyone hears a song a different way and hears timing a different way.

Like dancers with choreography or actors with scripts, jazz singers could take material that was known, even loved, then risk interpreting and revising it. They could conceal even as they revealed themselves. Inflection, timing and tonality were their language, at least as much as words.