Quotes About Interpretation

When you feel that the way you interpret the world is fairly idiosyncratic, you can feel somewhat ostracized and lonely.

As an artist, you're always somewhat obscure. We're not talking Hollywood.

I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable.

Over the years, my 'Door' paintings have become somewhat mythologized.

I'm somewhat old-fashioned, and I still talk about playing a part. I don't talk about my work - 'I've seen some of your work' - there's not much work in it, is there?

Anybody who knows me knows that half the time I'm saying things with a somewhat humorous overtone.

We're falling into a place where melody is somewhat lacking in music. Everybody feels like, okay, too much melody or too much harmony, and it kind of goes over people's heads; they don't understand it.

The longer I look at something, the more my imagination churns and I can find somewhere to put it.

If you're cast right you can actually just let yourself go because all your gestures will be right, all your intonations will be right because you just somewhere understand who this person is.

To read a character I'm not sympathizing with is generally quite a good, attractive proposition because I've got somewhere to go, I've got work to do, to try to understand why they behave like they behave, to relate entirely and understand them and to be completely emotionally connected. That is much more fun 99 percent of the time.

I don't have any complex plans for playing a character. I think all I try to do is not make too many bad guy faces and not ever try to seem too good. I just try to put it in the middle somewhere.

Sometimes a scene may be about one thing, and it may end up still being about that, but the emotionality of it comes from somewhere else, or the humor of it comes from somewhere else, and it gives it that real-life quality.

This is what I have discovered - and it has been a gift in itself - that books live over and over again in different people's minds. That I might mean one thing as I write, but a reader's experiences will take it somewhere else. That is like a conversation, I think. It is a true connecting up.

Hugh Lynn Cayce, Edgar Cayce's son, is quoted as saying, The best interpretation of a dream is one you apply.

Learning great works like the Liszt Sonata or Beethoven's 'Hammerklavier' should be a struggle to a certain extent, where you need to labor intensely with your own brain and soul for the meaning of the work instead of cutting and pasting a bunch of stuff together from the Internet and - boom! - there you are with a performance ready to go.

I think I enjoy Sondheim so much because of the lyrics. The lyrics, the cornucopia of options.

I compare Stephen Sondheim with humor, because humor is unanalyzable. You can't analyze humor. You just have to get through it.

Every song is like a painting.

A good song should give you a lot of images; you should be able to make your own little movie in your head to a good song.

'If You Could Read My Mind' is a different experience every time I sing it. It's just that kind of a song.

Every artist and every song has an idea, and the producer's job is to capture it.

It's not enough to play a song: you have to inhabit it.

I always prefer other people's interpretations over my own, so I'm not very quick to make explicit what exactly a song or record is about.

It's so interesting how you can take a bad situation and make a great song out of it that somebody else can listen to and have a completely different perspective of the song and have their own meaning. That's what's great about it.