Quotes About Interpretation

The first thing to say about Finnegans Wake is that it is, in an important sense, unreadable.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

My body was braille for the creeping influences.

Since when," he asked, "Are the first line and last line of any poem Where the poem begins and ends?

The world keeps happening, in accordance with its rules; it's up to us to make sense of it and give it value.

the real world, people are not completely rational, they don't have common knowledge, they misinterpret one another, and they certainly don't start with the same priors

Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.

I don't read like other people do - back and forth, across the page. I tend to scan a page at a time.

Every time you get a script and you have a scene, you start mining out how many layers there are within it.

I've been doing interviews for years, and in all that time, I've virtually never read one and gone, 'Yep, factually and tonally that's exactly what happened.' Pretty much never.

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.

I am still trying to find out things. And I inevitably tell myself the story in different ways every time I think about it.

In a general sense, to convert any short story, novel, play, or opera into a movie, you have to re-rig it. Even though they're all narratives over time, they're very different forms.

But that's not what an actor does. An actor finds things in the moment with a director and other actors that you don't have time to hand-draw or animate with a computer.

I sometimes find the surface interesting. To say that the mark of a good portrait is whether you get them or get the soul - I don't think this is possible all of the time.

When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not.

I just sing the song and I sing it with conviction, meaning and I get into the mood of every song I do no matter how much time I have in between.

... but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.

I spend a lot of time copying saxophone players and trumpet players.

People have a hard time reading my comics. I think I leave things out, but I feel you should.

The songs themselves do broaden out as time passes and take on subtly different meanings, take on more meaning, I find.

The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.

I have never turned to my girlfriend and said, Oh, okay, babe, and I see it in scripts all the time.

When you're on your own, you look for signs. Sometimes you make them up, sometimes they're actually there, but most of the time you can't tell the difference from the two.