Quotes About Interpretation

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

I sometimes think that what I do as a writer is make a kind of colouring book, where all the lines are there, and then you put in the colour.

I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.

Men whose sense of taste is destroyed by sickness, sometimes think honey sour. A diseased eye does not see many things which do exist, and notes many things which do not exist. The same thing frequently takes place with regard to the force of words, when the critic is inferior to the writer.

I am a writer and not a judge.

You see the genius that Whitney Houston has as an interpreter of material, and you realize why genius can be applied to only a few interpretive performers. She finds meaning and depth and soulfulness in a song that often the writer and composer never really knew was there.

I think that when I'm an actor, I get hired, and you say jump three inches, I'll jump three inches. I just kind of trust what the writer's vision is.

I'm a writer, so whatever gymnastics jump through my head, I write about it.

I really think that as good of a job as you do as a writer, you're absolutely indebted to the actors that have to deliver that material.

Limited points of view let the writer dispense - and the reader gather - information from various corners of the story. It all becomes a kind of dance, with the writer guiding the reader through the various twists and turns. The challenge is keeping readers in step, while still managing to surprise.

I am an artist and have no right buggering about with verbs and split infinitives, which is what being a writer says to me.

It's always hard when you're playing someone for a lot of people out there who are going to see the movie after reading the books. There's a communion between a reader and the writer, so people will have an idea who Sirius Black is and I might not be everyone's idea of that.

My background is really being a writer's actor - that seems to be the way I work best, bringing out the best of writing. There's a whole range of acting skills, and some people can be astonishing with very poor material. That's not me; my skill is essentially unlocking the writing.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

Writers speak stench.

Things like 'mad as a hatter' or 'grinning like a Cheshire cat', are so powerful that music and songs incorporate the imagery. Writers, artists, illustrators, a lot of them have incorporated that.

I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.

All writers are liars. They twist events to suit themselves. They make use of their own tragedies to make a better story... They are terrible people.

Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.

Writers have to be observant. Every nuance, every inflection in a voice, the quality of air, even - they all get mixed up in this soup of the story developing in our minds.

It really helped me as a writer to understand how other writers think.

Artists - musicians, painters, writers, poets - always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.

As writers, we are sketching people all the time when we write fiction.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.