Seamus Heaney Quotes

Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes.

When you haven't met someone, regardless of whether they're an author or not, when you're taking their work, and you are in some way filtering it or interpreting it, of course there's potential for them to feel that you have, in some way, not lived up to what it could have been.

To be true to a play, you can't add something that takes away from the author's intent.

I'm rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work, it's no longer his... I just see what people make of it.

I don't eschew autobiographical writing, but I'm not interested in mine to be so straightforward. The things that tend to move me the most are often those that I have to figure out its meaning for myself. The human being's ability to make a metaphor to describe a human experience is just really cool.

Rock & roll is not about what you play, it's about how you play it.

I think the struggle, whenever you make a film or television movie based on a real person's life, is finding a dramatic arc that will hold an audience's attention.

For me, Picasso was the ultimate man. He taught me that photography is all about how you approach an image: what you do and what you don't do. He inspired me to go beyond what you think is in front of you.

I don't have what German directors call 'a concept' - a solid, fixed sense of the pattern that you should impose on the given work. I always get the feeling that I am raking up the earth rather than laying down the concrete.

Sometimes you have to lie. One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit.

Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got there before we got there.

I hate when a movie just sort of ends and is so open-ended you feel like it wasn't finished. I appreciate leaving things up to the interpretation of the audience and letting them make decisions about where things will go in the future - but the director has to make a decision; otherwise it is sort of a cop-out.

The question I ask myself when adapting a book is how do I be true to the spirit and soul of the character? How would I describe this character in my medium? If you asked one person to do a painting of something and another to create a sculpture of it, you'll never ask, 'Why doesn't the painting look like the sculpture?'

This outfit called Los Angeles Theatre Works does readings of plays.

I think it's always challenging to look at a script and make it your own while maintaining the sense of what the style of the show is.

I try to leave things as open ended as possible, not too overladen with meaning.

I have been working up until recently with Neil Simon, who has been adapting the character to me.

I'm more interested in seeing what the material tells me than in imposing my will on it.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

I don't tend to be a nitpicker when I'm watching movies, so as long as something is true to the spirit of the original, that's very much what we got for. You try to never do something that the original author wouldn't have done themselves.

My work is always very geometric.

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.

Historians have to deal with facts and they are committed to the facts. The trouble is that facts are imperfect. The novelist comes up with an imaginary structure. This is not what happened. It is what could have happened. And sometimes this brings more understanding …

A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.

Auditioning is so different than doing the work in some ways. It's very much about solving the scene, I think, and coming in with a strong take, but not having it set in stone.