Quotes About Interpretation

Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.

Writers mean more than they say and say more than they mean.

Painters of paintings, writers of books, never could tell the half.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.

The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.

The advantage of being the creator of the character is I know them better than anybody, I like to think. But the reality one has to deal with in a serial collaborative medium like comics is that you're not the only one who writes the character.

Because if someone writes something and they have decided this is what it is, it's my job to make it work unless it's way out of left field.

I do not believe in pure idioms. I think there is naturally a desire, for whoever speaks or writes, to sign in an idiomatic, irreplaceable manner.

I'm not a person who writes really abstract things with oblique references. I look at abstraction like I look at condiments. Give me some Tabasco sauce, some ketchup, some mayonnaise. I love all of that. Put it on a trumpet. I've just got to have the ketchup and Tabasco sauce. That's my attitude about musical philosophy.

When a critic or journalist writes, 'It's too complex,' or, 'It's full of plot holes,' they very rarely take the step of identifying what they mean. The reason they do that is to protect themselves, because they don't want to reveal that they may have misunderstood or missed something.

As a writer, one is always a little blind to what one writes.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

One of my favorite poets, Neruda, writes close to the bone. Though I know only a little Spanish, I like to compare the Spanish and English lines and see how the translator worked.

I think it's an area that one writes from that is curious because it is not a clearly defined partisan one.

Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.

The artist writes, paints, sings or dances the burden of some idea or feeling off his mind.

I felt a little green, because Shakespeare writes the thought process within the text; it was tricky not to think of what to say and then say it, and instead just deliver the lines.

Perfect objectivity is always impossible, no matter who writes a person's biography.

Everything is autobiography, even if one writes something that is totally objective. The fact that it's a subject that seizes you makes it autobiographical.

A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.

If a woman writes about a domestic situation, everyone automatically assumes that it's about her.

That's the thing: once it's in their hands, it's not my book anymore, it's theirs. I have no idea what happens when they start to digest it. So when someone writes me to explain how they read it, what it was like, what they enjoyed, there's a thrill. Writers who don't make their email addresses public are missing out on something wonderful.

It's still funny for me to think of myself as someone who writes historical fiction because it seems like a really fusty, musty term, and yet it clearly applies.

Whether I'm writing the script, or someone else writes the initial draft, I'm always an actor's director first. I always try to listen to them a lot and try to put their voices into their character.