Quotes About Interpretation

I love writing fiction - you can take just what you want from a place, and leave the rest.

I change lyrics to the songs all the time, too. I don't know if it matters in a lot of ways because you can take what you want from it.

It's weird to try to write lyrics for somebody else. They can't really get behind what you're saying or what you want them to say because they didn't experience it.

Art doesn't alter things. It points things out, but it doesn't alter them. It can't, no matter what a painter wants to do.

Look, I happen to agree with what George says about the interpretation of the New Testament, but I want to remind both of you to never play God.

I emphasize listening. We strive to hear what other people want us to hear, even though they don't always come out and say it directly.

As an actor, you're a color of paint on someone else's palette. But as a director, it's your canvas and you make the painting you want to make.

If Sigmund Freud had watched Phil Donahue he would never have wondered what women want.

I hope my recordings of my own works won't inhibit other people's performances. The brutal fact is that one doesn't always get the exact tempo one wants, although one improves with experience.

When Toni Morrison said 'write the book you want to read,' she didn't mean everybody.

I learnt early on that your audience take the songs in the way they want to rather than the way you might want them too.

Novelists want to flood, poets want to distill.

And over the course of the last six years, as I've directed more features and commercials, I've become better at articulating exactly how I want the audience to feel.

Art is so subjective, and people can react however they want.

Content to me is very important, but I like it when [the photograph] is also enigmatic. If you don't know what it is you begin to speculate, and that is what I want.

I think one of the paradoxes of writing fiction is when people enjoy it, they want it to be real. So they look for connections.

People see what they want to see when they need to.

You're talking to someone, to a reader, and you get to express in the way you want to. And you get to play with it. It's kind of like acting, but it's on paper.

Personally, I think you can put any interpretation you want on anything, but when someone suggests that Can't Buy Me Love is about a prostitute, I draw the line. That's going too far.

If a psychiatrist would analyze [the lyrics], I'm sure they'd come up with something interesting. I really don't try to twist them. I don't want to slash things.

That's what you want art to do, to open people up and start conversations.

Animals... don't have a sense of time. You just have to do things over and over with animals until they happen to do it right because they don't really know what you want.

As a director, you have to go in with a really, really, really clear picture of what you want. That's the point of my commentaries. It's so difficult because you're the harshest critic.

I want you to understand clearly, I am not a journalist - be very clear on that. I am an opinion maker.