Quotes About Interpretation

When horror is about something - capital-A about - that's when it's really landing.

The only thing an actor can do is, whatever lands on the carpet in the hall, you read it, and if you can't put it down, that's the job to do.

When I sing, it's different from when I speak in a very interesting way. I think that, when you're singing, a message is carried in a different way. I don't know if that emotion needs a melody.

You'd think, of course, it's about the melody - that's a given. But really, I'm no good at singing a song unless it has a good lyric.

I always try, when I'm singing songs, to interpret them the way that I would've arranged them. I think about the melody first, and then I pull out my guitar and start singing it.

There is always a reverence issue, and I'm no different from any audience member that if someone's adapting a book or comic that I like, I really don't want them to screw it up.

I know when I sit with my band members and we're playing back a song that we've done, I know that they're experiencing it in a completely different way and hearing stuff that they're alerted to because the way the interpret the world is through their ears. Mine is through my eyes.

'Dreams from My Father' was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction.

Memoirs are a well-known form of fiction.

It's hard to get in the head of somebody. The closest we can get is through the words they've left behind, either their contemporary correspondence or after-the-fact memoirs.

The whole memorial is for different senses... seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling. I probably would have come up with something different if I had not lived through it.

No one ever sits you down at age eight and says, 'Aminatta, this is what's happened so far.' You have to work it out for yourself, and by the time you do, it's ancient history to many of the players. We're trying to make sense of the past, so we start to excavate our memories.

To know the laws is not to memorize their letter but to grasp their full force and meaning.

If I know I have to memorize lines, I'm really gonna try to memorize lines. It's hard for me sometimes, because somebody wrote these words and you're trying really hard to get them the way they said it.

I'm always trying to memorize lines, whether I understand them or not.

True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.

I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.

Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand.

I believe poetry has very little to do with memory.

Men and women are different, and they can never read each other's mind.

What a thing is and what it means are not separate, the former being physical and the latter mental as we are accustomed to believe.

What Joanna and Solange and Kanye all had in common was a mental image of what the sound is supposed to be. As a collaborator, my goal has to be to help them get toward that mental image. That was cool.

One of the bad things about being a filmmaker, about being me, is I can hardly read a book anymore because every time I read something, I have a poaching mentality, like, 'Oh, can this be a movie?'

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?