Quotes About Interpretation

I've never been in a bad play. There might have been bad productions and I might have been bad in them, but I've never been in a play that wasn't interesting or worthwhile doing on some level.

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

If cattle and horses, or lions, had hands, or were able to draw with their feet and produce the works which men do, horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make the gods' bodies the same shape as their own.

If I asked for a cup of coffee, someone would search for the double meaning.

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.

Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

I would never impose my own personal convictions upon the law.

If the Bible had said that Jonah swallowed the whale, I would believe it.

I'm good at reading people. If I wasn't an actor, I would be a psychologist.

You have to surrender to a book. If you do, when something in it seems to be going askew, you are wounded. The more you have surrendered to a book, the more jarring its errors appear.

A good tracker is interpreting all the time, from every little sign, you know? Not just interpreting the age of the tracks but also: Is it wounded? Is it hungry? A good tracker is interpreting a lot.

For a song cycle to work, you have to feel these things when you hear them and you either have an emotional reaction to it or you don't. The plotline is something that gets woven together in the back-story.

If someone stands in front of one of my paintings and says, 'This is just a mess', the word 'just' is not so good, but 'mess' might be right. Why not a mess? If it makes you say, 'Wow, I've never seen anything like that', that's beautiful.

When you watch it, you're like, Wow. I look like that. But it doesn't feel like that at all. It was about communicating with Gale Harold and getting across what I wanted to say about the character.

You see a comic, and you're like, 'Oh wow: the Riddler has been drawn this way, and he's been drawn that way.' There are tons of looks, and his personality changes based on who's writing them.

The easiest bit is when you're talking. It's listening that is so difficult. If you get out any Spencer Tracy film, you think, 'Wow, he's doing nothing, yet he's doing everything.'

When I rehearse, it ends up doing more harm than good. I think I work a little bit better when it's right off the bat. Mostly, I try to wrap my head around a role as much as I can without rehearsing and then kind of make it as fresh as possible on the day.

I do like to wrap things up and leave some things to the readers' imagination.

If some of our works are symphonies, then wrapped walkways was chamber music.

People still think there's sort of a debate around the Charter that politicos go into. And I get wrapped up in it, too, from time to time.

What I like most about directing is creating a world more so than anything. To me, the music is the wrapping paper on that world.

Shakespeare pulls on us and demands the best of us. You never successfully wrestle one of his plays to the ground and say, 'See? That's It!'

If it's just brushstrokes wrestling around, it isn't much of a picture book, is it? There still has to be a picture. And maybe it needs to be a picture of a dog named Daisy or a little girl riding a bike. So I have to be careful before I get too carried away in the manner itself.

I sort of approach wrestling the way Johnny Depp approaches movies. I don't really care necessarily what I'm portraying.