Quotes About Interpretation

So many books that have Christian characters but are written by atheists mercilessly pillory and mock and question the motives of people with faith. I'm past all that.

There have been more books alone written about Hamlet than have been written about the Bible.

What I'm after is a composed music that will sound like improvised music when improvisors play it. You shouldn't be able to tell what parts are being improvised and what parts were written out beforehand; it should sound like the same music.

In The Touch, the love scenes are the same as they were in The Thorn Birds or anything else I've ever written. I find a way of saying that either it was heaven or hell but in a way that still leaves room for the reader to use their own imagination.

I love deliberately badly written books.

I have written a lot about the fine arts, but I'd never written about the literary arts, and so on some level Dante really, you know, spoke to me, as new ground but also familiar ground.

Everything I've ever written, I had a very distinct vision of what I wanted it to look like. But, other directors never do it that way.

When I'm scoring something like a string quartet, it's all notated music, so it's meticulously written in the score, which is very different than doing things by ear.

Learning to read the Bible in the light of the times in which it was written is critical.

Something's that written out is okay, but it's not always a clear indication of what a person means.

The picture alone, without the written word, leaves half the story untold.

Unless you're doing Shakespeare or Chekhov... the written word is not sacrosanct.

But for me, really, the written word is always stronger than film.

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong.

If a man is talking in the forest, and there is no woman there to hear him, is he still wrong?

If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that sometimes our assumptions and preconceived notions are wrong, and therefore, our interpretation of events is incorrect. This causes us to overreact, to take things personally, or to judge people unfairly.

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than the exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.

Right and wrong are both very subjective, it's all grey.

I don't look for signs. But when things happen, I say, 'OK, something must be right.' Or 'OK, something must be wrong.'

I will come out with my interpretation. If I'm wrong, fine. It will become part of the debris of history, part of the give and take.

If the lecture is good, then everything is too smooth. That's the same in music: if the performance is too good, you really don't enjoy it, because it just goes by, and you can never penetrate into the heart of it. Sometimes a poor performance is better for enjoyment, because you can look at those things that were wrong and analyze them.

The Tudors' is terrible history with no point. It's wrong for no purpose.

If you hear a statistic, you will make up a story to go with it, because our brains are organized on narrative. And you may very well make up a wrong story because you only have one fact, which is a statistic.

Comedy is so subjective. If you trip and fall down, some people will laugh, and some people will say, 'Oh, physical comedy is so pedestrian.' Some people look at Three Stooges as lowbrow; some people consider them artists. No one is wrong. It's just a personal take.