Ann Dowd Quotes

Clarity is so important for Shakespeare.

Some things in literature are inexplicable.

Shakespeare didn't work at all for me.

The hours I spent attempting to decipher some of Dunnett's more oblique passages opened me to the possibilities of romantic storytelling.

Algebra looked like Chinese characters to me, and I could never get into reading Shakespeare. I just did not get it.

Being a literature major, you know, I'm very familiar with the ways symbolism is used in our sort of mythic tales of society, so anyone who is consciously trying to pull that off I think is really interesting and clearly very smart.

I don't think there's anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book.

Lady Gaga said to me, 'You showed me how it's done.' I have no idea what she meant by 'it.'

Part of the process of reading is constantly hitting the pause button, and now and then the rewind button, to ponder a word that's been chosen by the author as exquisitely as the filmmaker chooses an image or a sound editor chooses a sonic clue - the tolling of a bell in the distance to evoke memory, for instance.

But it's not just a game of finding literary references.

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.

When I read 'Room,' I absolutely loved it, and I thought I knew how to make it.

I'm not an enormous proponent of plot as a reader. It's about other things; my reading has become specialized over the years.

I believe that sometimes, when we talk about books, we're talking about the big picture - how they're relevant.

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .

I do not understand this analogy," Mencheres muttered.

i can't understand her" well son, you might as well try to understand the sun". derived form the book:fires of heaven by robert jordan.

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.

With this book in my hands, reading aloud to my friends, questioning them, explaining to them, I was made clearly to understand that I had no friends, that I was alone in the world. Because in not understanding the meaning of the words, neither I nor my friends, one thing became very clear and that was that there were ways of not understanding and that the difference between the non-understanding of one individual and the non-understanding of another created a world of terra firma even more solid than differences of understanding.

Everyone only hears what he understands.

How was I to know? ... You didn't say anything.""I said lots of things," he corrected gently. "You just didn't hear them.

Nobody is ever misunderstood at a fireside; he may only be disagreed with.

Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?