Quotes About Interpretation

If Christians see Mormonism as a dramatic deviation from a millennia-old, biblically-based faith, Jews see Christianity in the same light.

Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, 'What happened?' but rather, 'How then shall I live?' And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.

The world comes at me that way - comes at me in clumps of stuff, sometimes little vignettes and sometimes whole stories. And then the rest is erased by the internal filter that erases things for the same reason you'd forget swatting a mosquito.

The most amazing thing you can ask for as an actor from a director is that you're being seen, that the choices made are informed.

The most important thing you can do as an actor is bring as much of yourself to the character to ground the character in some sort of reality, and then you build around it and on top of it.

Just to get the basic fundamentals and empathy - I think that's the most important thing to bring to it if you've acted in the past and are now a director: the empathy.

I don't think that Slaughterhouse-Five was successful movie material. In fact, Vonnegut's books mostly I don't feel are movie material.

How much of a book review is about the reviewer? Sometimes it's mostly about the reviewer!

Many mothers or daughters assume that words only mean one thing. 'If I feel criticised, that has to be the whole story', and 'if I feel I am being helpful, that has to be the whole story'.

Sometimes our passion will motivate us to say things that can easily be misunderstood.

I love my stories being multi-layered, and coming at it from different angles, so that you don't understand the film's true emotional motivation until the very end.

You have to think an awful lot about your motivations or people's behavioral intentions or what their body language can indicate or what's really going on or what makes people sometimes do, sometimes, the irrational things they do.

I was always curious about motivation and intention, and really, that's a lot of what acting is.

The motivation is important for me to act it, but I don't necessarily want the audience to know my motivation.

In the Bible, there is absolutely no motivation for Judas, other than that he is sort of a 100 percent figure of evil. And it seemed to me that that was probably not the case.

What words openly declare can be tested against empirical evidence, but what words insinuate can bypass that safeguard. Even an innocent-sounding phrase like "income distribution," endlessly repeated, can suggest a process in which income exists somehow and is then distributed, as one might distribute food at a dinner table or gifts at Christmas.

Men are rewarded and punished not for what they do, but rather for how their acts are defined. This is why men are more interested in better justifying themselves than in better behaving themselves.

The person who kills himself sees suicide as a solution. If the observer views it as a problem, he precludes understanding the suicide just as surely as he would preclude understanding a Japanese speaker if he assumed that he is hearing garbled English.

Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose.

The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

At times Thucydides may be clearly mistaken in both detail and interpretation, but the extent of his accuracy and analysis astounds in a world where travel was difficult, written sources rarely available, and the physical obstacles to the writing of history substantial.

Schönheit liegt im Auge des Betrachters.

The work is at such a high level and is so well executed, it really is a matter of taste... [Source: Project Runway — but consider, applied to the theme of book reviews, it seems apropos!]

There is a difference between memorizing Scripture and thinking biblically.