Quotes About Interpretation

Heller's Catch-18, Fitzgerald's The High-Bouncing Lover, Orwell's The Last Man in Europe, Tolstoy's All's Well That Ends Well

didn't use, and hadn't even heard, the word "totalitarianism." I probably would have thought it had something to do with refusing a drink.

I write from life. But the reader, you know, imports the symbols, the associations. I can't keep them out. That's how poetry works.

When player and listener together know the route so well, the pleasure is in the deviation, the unexpected turn against the grain. To see a world in a grain of sand.

Ragged curls of unfurling ampersands swam across her vision.

Which brought me back to my worry. Why had he turned up just then? Why at that precise moment? Why not the day before or after, for example? Was it just random, or was there an underlying pattern I couldn't yet see? Shakespeare, you understand, as interpreted by Henry Lytten. The greater the coincidence, the greater the importance of the hidden causation.

I tried to picture a female version of Jim and got Jim in a dress instead. The image was disturbing.

I looked at him. You really need to work on your threats. I can't tell if you're threatening me or inviting me for tea.

The woman frowned. I probably should have mentioned that annoying habit of letting people come to the wrong conclusions and not correcting them? He got it from me.

You don't return your phone calls." The vampire leaned forward, tapping my doodle with a scimitar claw. "Is that a lion with horns and a pitchfork?" "Yep." "Is he carrying the moon on his pitchfork?" "No, it's a pie. What can I do for Atlanta's premier Master of the Dead?

Jack didn't fully get Jesus. Audrey tried to explain it, and he could repeat it back to her, word for word, but he still didn't comprehend most of it. The best he could gather was that Jesus lived long ago, told people to be nice, and they killed him for it. At the end, he asked who was Jesus' necromancer and if he was in the Bible, then Kaldar couldn't stop laughing and had to sit down.

In there?' She nodded. 'You want us to go into the tortoise?' Another nod. 'It's alive.' Another nod.

The decorator of Las Colimas must have been a great admirer of both early Aztec and late Taco Bell architectural styles.

You're sending some confusing signals." Curran growled deep in his throat. "That's impressive but not really informative, Your Furriness.

If a cultural reference flies over a man's head, does it make a sound if nobody else gets it.

Nowadays people's visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will.

As much as I appreciate people putting me in the category of these very acrobatic belters, I feel like my strength is my... interpretation and my truthfulness with songs, and I don't want young people to think it's all about the high notes that they have to hit.

There are always dimensions, and the way they get expressed is through the writing and the actors and the director you get to work with on that day. But there are always dimensions, outside of really basic stuff for very young people where it needs to be very clear.

I went to Concord, a young woman from the backwoods, firm in belief that Emerson was the first of living men. He was the modern Moses who had talked with God apart and could interpret Him to us.

Nothing in the reporting of a nation's history could so mislead the younger generation as to represent great events in such a way that they appear to have happened as a matter of course.

In English, there is one word for sister. In Chinese, there are two separate words, for elder and younger sister. This is actually a translation problem because if you see the word sister, you don't know how to translate it to Chinese because you don't know if it's an elder sister or younger.

Doing voiceovers is so great because even though many people would think it's just your voice, you really do use all your physicality. I've done everything from playing a butterfly to Alice in Wonderland when she's 10 feet tall, so it allows you to be an actor and build new characters.

It is really hard to completely re-learn how to express yourself without using words. When you take away speech, you have to re-invent the way you express yourself. You have to exaggerate your body language and your facial expressions.

My No. 1 piece of advice, especially for someone who's an actor-singer-dancer - a triple threat, they're called! - people say, 'What's the most important?' I always say acting. Without knowing why you're singing or what you're singing about, it's just noise. And without knowing why you're moving your body, it's just flailing of arms.