Sarah Kay Quotes

It doesn't seem Shakespeare works if you turn him into a religion.

The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.

History is complex.

The power of a thing or an act is in the meaning and the understanding.

The job of an anthropologist is to make the familiar strange and to make the strange familiar,

History is not only the record of the past, but also the discipline of investigating and interpreting the past. The study of history develops habits of critical thinking and effective writing, as well as cultivates the careful analysis of various types of quantitative and qualitative evidence.

They always find new ways of talking about my movies.

That's what politics is. It's the story of what's happening, what does it mean, what's the conclusion, who are the interesting characters?

Stats aren't everything.

I do wish that reviews were less like book reports. There was an era when reviewers had something to say about a book: when they painted context and drew conclusions. Many reviews these days are little more than plot summary.

I would definitely agree that 'The Witch' doesn't leave much of anything to the imagination. There are some ambiguities about 'The Witch,' for sure, but all in all, it's pretty clear what's going on.

I think the benefit of being a writer is that I'm looking for the subtext on the page, because all good writing has subtext. And as a writer, you look at the big scope of things, the big story, rather than just your individual story line, because I think it's important to know what you're in and how you fit into it.

You really can't quantify what 'Dietland' is.

Why does a writer labor over nuance and context if it won't be respected, if a critic insists on ignoring the writing at hand in favor of a more convenient analysis of his or her own particular pet peeves and straw men?

I think what we should do as historians is understand. And we can have our own views about how things turned out, but I think, in making judgements, we're getting into tricky territory.

History is sometimes hard. We study it and try to discover facts.

Details - that's what it comes down to, so you're always learning more about a play or a concept.

The metaphors exist for the stories.

I worry about images. Images are what things mean.

The information was correct but the interpretations were not.

Book! You lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.

Of course, a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.

Nothing makes me happier than to have a smart person tell me why the show is smart, especially if I didn't intend that. I tend to be a very instinctual writer, and I don't plot shows out like, "This is my thesis and this is how I'm going to subtly sneak my thesis into this episode." I just approach it from, "We know these characters well, here are the situations that they're in, now how would they behave? What would the consequences be?" And it's always fun to see how people interpret that and dissect it afterward, and make me and the other writers seem probably smarter than we really are.

The facts never speak for themselves. They have to be interpreted in terms of some understanding of where they come from and what the relation between them is.

Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.