Quotes About Interpretation

What we value about music and literature are the moments that they create in our minds when we encounter them.

I think of workshopping as a way to read your own work through the eyes of others - a scene that you write gets refracted by those around you, and suddenly you have several different readings of it, each with a different momentum for how it might be retooled or reshaped.

I had written a story. I wrote the story out of some desperation, really, and I didn't know I was writing a story, and it took me years. And when I finished, a friend of mine had the idea that the story should be read as a monologue in a theater.

There's so much art out there, and I'm happy to see people who are drawing monsters that are very simple designs.

It appears to be monumental only because it's art.

'Monuments Men' is not a docudrama. It's not a documentary.

If there is a book that the script came from you have to read it, you have to see what you can get out of it: mood, back story and things that may not even be in the film. They kick off your imagination and broaden the character, I think.

When you write songs, you can't really point out the exact thing you're inspired by. It's more a state or a mood or an atmosphere that you're trying to put into words.

For an artist it is important to show what your mood is at that particular moment.

When you're trying to create imagery, you're trying to create a feeling or a mood.

We see the moon, don't we? So it's our eye. Animals see us, don't they? So we're their animals.

I never fixed a story. I didn't make judgments, I let the listener make judgments. When I got to the end of the story, if it had a moral, I let the listener find it.

In a constitutional democracy the moral content of law must be given by the morality of the framer or legislator, never by the morality of the judge.

American history has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.

In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean.

Working with Dominic Savage was an amazing experience. You don't have a full script to follow so you're more or less improvising and he tells you what he wants out of the scene.

I can't really sit around and talk with people who believe that the Bible is the way it happened, because that's man-made. I'm a writer, too; that's how I look at the Bible. Like, 'I could've written a better version than that,' you know? At least a more interesting one, and then maybe more people would go to church. I could definitely do a revamp.

The more people who look at great art, the better for our culture.

The more people explore the world, the more they realize in every country there's a different aesthetic. Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.

More and more people are seeing the films on computers - lousy sound, lousy picture - and they think they've seen the film, but they really haven't.

I start with the story, almost in the old campfire sense, and the story leads to both the characters, which actors should best be cast in this story, and the language. The choice of words, more than anything else, creates the feeling that the story gives off.

I believe acting to be my own journey through connection more than anything else, but that's only my take on it.

I love more than anything looking at a movie scene by scene and seeing the intention behind it. It allows you to really appreciate the hand of the filmmaker.

More than anything else, I love to act and leave the rest to my director.