Quotes About Interpretation

With great artists like Elvis, sometimes the songs weren't the greatest thing about him. When I tried to perform some of the songs, I noticed some of the tunes weren't all that brilliant, but it was the performance that sold them.

I love rearranging and reimagining tunes, so I want my audience to enjoy hearing songs in a new way and make their own discoveries.

It depends on the material. Sometimes I sound like him, sometimes not. There are certain tunes we do that are so familiar to the audience that to perform them without making them sound like Frank Sinatra would be wrong.

We listen to the entrepreneur. We try to have a fine tuning fork to understand what they are saying and whether that makes sense and know it when we see it. We don't try to do too much predicting.

When I take on a role, all I tend to do is get to know the script and ask millions of questions, and keep fine tuning what I think the character is trying to say.

The only way to find out anything about what kinds of lives people led in any given period is to tunnel into their records and to let them speak for themselves.

I speak German, Turkish and English perfectly. And I can communicate in Russian.

I speak Farsi, German, Dari, and I understand Turkish, but I haven't used it since 1985, so I'm a bit rusty.

If I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said.

Faulkner turned out to be a great teacher. When a student asked a question ineptly, he answered the question with what the student had really wanted to know.

With fantasy and sci-fi, it's based in a real fandom. You're presenting to experts, and their source material is really important to them. They'll come up and ask: 'so when you turned your head slightly in that scene, what were you thinking?'

I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.

You see the names of places roundabout? They're mine now, and I've turned them inside out.

When actors have the opportunity to play a larger-than-life icon - my wife did it with Tina Turner, and Jamie Foxx did it with Ray Charles - you have to make a decision how you go in. What do you start with? Where do you begin?

As an actor, acting is like playing a sport. You do this thing that's intangible, and while it's happening, it's great. But then when it's done, there's really no tangible product. Someone else is capturing it and turning it into something tangible.

A dead tree, cut into planks and read from one end to the other, is a kind of line graph, with dates down one side and height along the other, as if trees, like mathematicians, had found a way of turning time into form.

Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.

Contemporary paganism gives me a subjective lens through which the world in which I live can be interpreted on an aesthetic and an ethical basis. I'm interested in narrative, myth, and story, in folklore and the way we connect to the turning of the seasons and the natural world.

M.I.T. has a reputation for turning out Dilberts. They may be brilliant in what they do, but no one can understand what they say.

I'm one of the culprits who keeps turning stuff around, shaking up original tunes and trying to stand the canon on its ear. But sometimes, you just need to sing the song.

The idea of turning an album into a living piece of art and adding new installations is really intriguing. It expands the journey.

A novel is a relationship, you know? When you read a book, the writer has done half the work, and you're doing half the work. You're providing the imagination; the words are turning into pictures in your mind. There's an active relationship that's going on.

My dad, before he passed away, never understood what I did. What I say is that I'm responsible for translating the director's vision, hopefully turning an idea into something people can connect to and relate to.

My brain never turns off of songwriting. Every conversation, everything I see, I'm just kind of like a sponge and I soak it up.