Quotes About Interpretation

As a fan of pop music myself, I hate discovering that a favourite track has a completely different meaning from the one I thought.

A lot of our tracks have sounded a lot better than I thought they would because of recording, mixing, and because I probably didn't hear it that way. I'm not a songwriter.

I started writing rhymes first and then put it to the music. I figured out I could lock it to the beat better if I heard the music first. I like to get a lot of tracks, put the track up and let the music talk to me about what it's about.

I feel like, for me as an artist, it takes me a while of living with the tracks and living with the body of work to realize what it's all about.

Trying to decipher where President Obama really stands on free trade can be like trying to trace the U.S.-Mexico border with a Google map. There are words, and there are actions - but there is mostly that long squiggly line in between.

How many soaps does P&G make? In a sense, they're all the same. Can you tell me the difference between trading soybeans, cotton and rubber? They're all soaps to us.

Directing is like putting together a collage.

I like density, not volume. I like to leave something to the imagination. The reader must fit the pieces together, with the author's discreet help.

Maybe because I can't even put together an IKEA desk, I've never been tempted to think of my own poems as built objects - but I do sometimes imagine them as mathematical constructs.

On historical you take the known facts, dramatize them, and then stitch them together by invention. It's a projective thing.

With music, it feels natural that, in my head, I can pull things apart and then put them back together very quickly.

Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.

And one might therefore say of me that in this book I have only made up a bunch of other people's flowers, and that of my own I have only provided the string that ties them together.

I'm not pretending to be an academic, or to have this down to a science. It's strictly my taste. But there is a connection between everything I play and the sets I put together.

When somebody's talking to us, they're not putting pauses - carefully putting pauses between words. It all flows together. The problem with that though, it's very hard to read.

Incorporating an awareness of style in the paintings gives them a kind of electricity and holds them together. It can plug you into the moment at which they were made.

In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance.

A lot of things come together to make up a song. It's just images.

I find it extremely difficult talking about my songs because there's so many different things that can make a song come together.

One has to be able to twist and change and distort characters, play with them like clay, so everything fits together. Real people don't permit you to do that.

I don't have a great respect for reality or getting the 'facts' as a means of putting together a story.

There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.

Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye.

London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.