Quotes About Interpretation

As a musician, you never understand why people connect with certain songs.

Ornette Coleman is a real musician. He takes all of the things he's thinking about in the world - which is a whole universe upon universe - and translates this into music.

Jimmy Slyde was more a musician than a dancer; Greg Hines was more musician than dancer.

Orchestral musicians have a different approach than we do, and when I say 'we,' I mean musicians who don't know what they are doing.

These people are artists. These people are musicians. They're taking it out and trying to express it that way.

Why can't jazz musicians just leave a melody alone?

If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades - one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.

It's not that we have two different kinds of Islam. I acknowledge the fact that we have two kinds of people. There are moderate Muslims and non-moderate Muslims. But there is really only one Islam, and this is the Islam of the life of Muhammad, of the Quran, of the Hadiths, of the Sunnah.

Out of 1.6 billion Muslims, perhaps only 300 million actually understand the language of the Koran.

The past is always recycled. I'm just taking what the people I looked up to did and translating it for my generation.

I would say that jazz is my own language.

I'm a historian in my own mind.

I always try to make each character my own.

Stories come to me in mysterious ways, more like dreams than reasoned creations.

The minute I start to talk about acting, I realize that I can't. You know, it's an abstract thing, a little bit mysterious even if you do it for a living.

Fashion can be this mysterious thing that you can't explain.

Acting is a mysterious process.

A lot of people don't give their audiences credit. You can leave it a little mysterious. They can think about it.

It's a mysterious thing, music. You're just never sure. You 'get' it, but does anyone else even get a chance to know it exists? And if they do, are they gonna feel about it like you feel? When they do, it feels great.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

How does my music connect to an audience? That is just a complete mystery to me.

It's a mystery to me what makes people laugh.

Fiction is able to do one thing better than any other art form: it is able to convey a convincing sense of what is going on in someone else's head. To me, that is the great mystery of life: what is everyone else thinking?

The first time I read something, I have this special feeling of being fully engaged with it. It's fresh to the audience because it's fresh to me. It's a little mystical, but I really believe that.