Quotes About Interpretation

Most historians are engaged in fiction.

Lots of historians are sniffy about re-enactors.

The blurring of fact and fiction has great commercial potential, which is bound to be corrupting in historical terms.

We need to understand that the Geneva Conventions are not just some historical documents born of another time, created for another purpose.

Anyone who says a movie about history is a historical document is crazy.

If you cut me open, you would find bits of me looking at things with an aesthetic eye, also with a historical eye. But mostly at the way things have transported themselves through time.

That great dust-heap called 'history'.

A film - especially when it's a personal film - is going to hit somebody or it's not. There's nothing you can do about it.

It is not about writing those hits again. I am sure I could write them, but it is about the sensibilities.

To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can't be said so well with words.

Just because someone is holding a gun doesn't make an image controversial. It all depends on where you put the gun, who is holding it.

I'm not sure what 'coming out right' means. It often means that what you do holds a kind of energy that you wouldn't just put there, that comes about through grace of some sort.

There's a lot of art and comics and movies being paid homage to by game designers.

As an actor, whether I'm playing Othello on stage or David Estes on 'Homeland,' that ability to give into your imagination is something that I enjoy.

Listening to music for me is like homework. Music will give me enjoyment, but as soon as it's giving me that enjoyment, I want to analyse it, and then it becomes work. Why does it sound like that? How?... then I dissect it.

There's always a certain kind of homework you have to do when there's an accent involved.

I am an actor and I do not have to relate to whatever I play on screen them at a personal level. What is important is to understand the character, do enough homework to know the frame of mind of the character or his back story.

I don't honestly think people know what acting is.

I love film because you have the last word. I never get that on stage because you've got to really believe; you've got to get the actors to trust you, and they have to believe in you, and then hopefully they will when you open the show.

I wanted to write some lyrics that had some meaning to them, lyrics that were meaningful to me and hopefully people can take something from that.

When I do my job, I dive into these characters and try to flush something out of myself into these characters, and hopefully that translates well.

I'm in love with the way that Ella Fitzgerald delivered a lyric. She would deliver a lyric with the kind of clarity that would make you wonder why it was written, and make you think about the writer. I think every writer hopes an Ella of any genre or anytime gets a hold of their work and works the song like that.

I was very glad later when I was directing that I wasn't in the hands of a cinematographer and hoping that he would do it well. I would know what he was doing, and we could discuss how that scene would look.

You hear it in the great musicians, whether it's a drummer or a horn player or a guitar player - you hear them take those breaths. You can feel that there's something they're trying to tell you.