Quotes About Interpretation

All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists.

They hear drums, we hear music.

Some of us don't like the way you've been telling it.

It takes almost as much imagination to justify what you write as it does to write it.

When you read and understand a poem, then you master chaos a little.

Paul Valery speaks of the 'une ligne donnee' of a poem. One line is given to the poet by God or by nature, the rest he has to discover for himself.

What one thinks of any region, while traveling through, is the result of at least three things: what one knows, what one imagines, and how one is disposed [Barry Lopez].

Sometimes something happens even when nothing happens. Other times nothing happening is exactly what it sound like. I have a friend in the mental-health field who would tell me that at times it can be difficult to tell those two things apart.

It's not the face, but the expressions on it. It's not the voice, but what you say. It's not how you look in that body, but the thing you do with it. You are beautiful.

The Bible has been interpreted to justify such evil practices as, for example, slavery, the slaughter of prisoners of war, the sadistic murders of women believed to be witches, capital punishment for hundreds of offenses, polygamy, and cruelty to animals. It has been used to encourage belief in the grossest superstition and to discourage the free teaching of scientific truths. We must never forget that both good and evil flow from the Bible. It is therefore not above criticism.

If the Old Testament were a reliable guide in the matter of capital punishment, half the people in the United States would have to be killed tomorrow.

Narration, after all, isn't just a literary function. It represents the human capacity to tell stories in such a manner that they yield meaning. Television replaced this concerted quest for meaning with a frantic pursuit of wonder.

The stories we tell, and the ones we absorb, are what allow us to pluck meaning from the rush of experience. Only through the patient interrogation of these stories can we begin to understand where we are and how we got here.

I think it's always funny when you see kids do Shakespeare.

You are surrounded by signs," she said. "Ignore none of them.

Imagine how tricky it would be to bake a cake if the recipe called for 45 minutes in the oven, and you had to figure out if those were nominal minutes or inflation-adjusted minutes.

I think that a song, when it works, never mind a piece of long form music, even a song is something that speaks to itself but has a language all of its own, ideally.

If you point out the moon to a cat, she probably won't look at the sky; she'll come up and sniff your finger.

You couldn't have ironed her voice any flatter.

Scientists didn't need to figure this out—Travis did it for them.

and at first I couldn't tell if he liked it or not. It was only after I'd finished "Light My Fire" that he sort of yelped and wrestled me to the ground (translation: he liked it). But I pinned him first. (Grin.)

So much of design is context.

Life is the definition you give to events that occur."

Your perceptions create your reality."