Quotes About Interpretation

I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

One of the tragedies of modern times is that people have come to believe that something said by someone in the past, perhaps for illustrative or provocation purposes, actually represents that person's beliefs at the time.

If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy.

I'm a storyteller: the crux of the matter is to reach beauty, poetry; it doesn't matter if that is comedy or tragedy. They're the same if you reach the beauty.

If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy. That's the comedy that I like.

The thing with 'No Man's Land' is not to see it, but how to make people to go to see it. The one negative criticism I've heard is that the relationship between tragedy and comedy is so perfect that it becomes suspicious. I take it as a complement.

All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.

A movie is painting, it's photography, it's literature - because you have to have the screenplay - it's music. Put a different soundtrack to a comedy and it's a tragedy. A movie combines all those forms and forces you to pay attention for two hours with a group of people.

The artist sees the tragic to such a degree that he is compelled to express the non-tragic.

Most people, even among those who know Shakespeare well and come into real contact with his mind, are inclined to isolate and exaggerate some one aspect of the tragic fact.

Every photograph is the photographer's opinion about something. It's how they feel about something: what they think is horrible, tragic, funny.

The nice thing with Shakespeare from a modern point of view is that a lot of stuff that was tragic for him can read as comic for us.

What some folks find funny, other folks find tragic.

And I've made it a choice on my records that sometimes I leave the breath or the trailing note that sometimes falls into a flat or a sharp.

My lyrics are quite train of thought, and they are all over the place, but they evoke something.

As a note, I never once refer to 'Train' as a game in the rules, and I also never refer to the participants as players.

Certainly, when you train as a classical dancer, you are very much influenced by 'Giselle.' You see it all the time; you start to learn the steps a little.

I trained to become a sign-language interpreter because it helps you read physical expression and the emotions of body language.

I think journalists and filmmakers are keen observers. And actors must also be sharp observers as they draw their characters and their stories from what they experience around them. After all, that is what actors, filmmakers, journalists are trained to be: observers. And then they do something with their observations.

I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things.

People misconstrue when I say I was a dancer. I was not classically trained. I was a street dancer, and I got to do what I did in the nightclubs of New York City.

My friends and family have been so well trained that they know I really mean it when I say that I don't care if the review is good, because that can be as dangerous as when it's bad. It's less demoralizing, but it can be just as confusing.

My joke is that my father was a minister and my mother was an English teacher, so I'm trained to see the world in terms of symbols, which is hard when you just want to make toast.

I'm a trained engineer, so I'm conditioned to come up with a right answer to a difficult question, but when it comes to art, there is no definite answer because it's so subjective.