Quotes About Interpretation

entailing difficult technical philosophical terms are so different from those of European thought, that they can hardly ever be accurately translated.

An audience doesn't have to know the precise events behind a character's Need, Public Persona, and Tragic Flaw. But the actor portraying that character does.

W. H. Auden used to say, rather pungently, that he could only truly "see" a poem once it's typed because "a man likes his own handwriting the way he likes the smell of his own farts.

all historical fiction is really contemporary fiction; you write out of your own time.44

in an age when most people get their history from TV and movies, we are losing our collective sense of "what really happened.

Words begin as description. They are prismatic, vehicles of hidden, deeper shades of thought. You can hold them up at different angles until the light bursts through in an unexpected color.

Research suggests that people rarely change their minds or form a new worldview based on facts or data alone; it is through stories (and the values systems embedded within them) that we come to reinterpret the world and develop empathy and compassion for others.

perhaps meaning to pretend to have misheard, as people sometimes do to buy time, when they think that what matters is how they respond, and not the thing that has been said

I am definitely of the method-acting school. Everything to me is about sound. I don't dress up in period costumes or anything like that. I'm very aural. When I'm working, I try to soak up the sounds of an era.

Being an artist, you soak up imagery, and you put it back out in whatever form you do your own imagery.

When I played drunks I had to remain sober because I didn't know how to play them when I was drunk.

The motif of Beat Generation is basically misunderstood, a misinterpreted area. There's this superimposition of the idea of a social rebellion, which was the communist interpretation through Lawrence Lipton.

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

I'm socially awkward in life, and that's one of the reasons why I do what I do. I'm more about interpreting other people's words.

As a general rule, I do not think judges should consider current societal preferences when ruling on constitutional challenges.

There's no such thing as an absolute openness. Openness is relative, I think, in all societies.

A society that does not correctly interpret and appreciate its past cannot understand its present fortunes and adversities and can be caught unawares in a fast changing world.

Cinema is a reflection of its own society.

Art reflects society. Cinema doesn't dictate - you portray what the society demands.

The role of art in society is not to resolve conflicts; rather, it is to express these conflicts and antagonisms.

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

I'm a big fan of Edouard Vuillard, so I'd like anything by him - particularly a painting called 'Madame Hessel on the Sofa.' His work is realistic without being literal: I can really imagine what Madame Hessel is thinking.

I'm like soft Ray Manzarek. I think of the keyboard as almost like a bass or a lead.

Oh, filmmakers, please don't take my soft book and turn it into a horror, or take my horror and make it soft.