Quotes About Interpretation

I do think you need to understand a character's motivation and perspective.

In every relationship, there are two perspectives to it.

When I write songs, I write from a lot of perspectives.

If you think aficionados of a living Constitution want to bring you flexibility, think again. You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it. That's flexibility.

There is no meaningful or persuasive constitutional distinction between semiautomatic handguns and semiautomatic rifles.

There's a classic medical aphorism: 'Listen to the patient; they're telling you the diagnosis.' Actually, a lot of patients are just telling you a lot of rubbish, and you have to stop them and ask the pertinent questions. But, yes, in both drama and medicine, isolated facts can accumulate to create the narrative.

A pessimist? That's a person who has been intimately acquainted with an optimist.

It never would have occurred to me in 'Days of Future Past' to cast Peter Dinklage as Bolivar Trask, and yet as soon as he got onscreen I couldn't think of anyone else.

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.

Giving a phenomenon a label does not explain it.

The idea of literalism in the Bible is a very new phenomenon. In many ways, it's a product of the scientific revolution.

Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.

You can't be too concerned with the philosophical meanings of the character and how it will affect everything else.

It seemed to me that the real philosophical breakthroughs of the 20th century were in terms of the understanding of language. What is language? Where does it come from, how does it work, what does it do?

And you finally get to a consensus, where you get a sense of what really ought to be done, and then they give it to me and then I draw it. I mean draw it in the sense, the philosophical sense.

We have to make philosophy itself an object of philosophical concern.

Everything we do is art, philosophy, mysticism, cultural commentary.

With modelling, if you want to be good at it, you try to tell a story in a photo and give a person a sense of feeling.

A photo does not mean I agree with anything someone says.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

You open a section of 'The New York Times,' and there's a review or a story on a choreographer or a dancer, and there's an informative, clear image of a dancer. This is, in my view, not an interesting photograph.

I crave to be able to photograph the way a painter paints - in a loose, expressive way.