Denzel Washington Quotes

I have intentions as a writer, but people - when they're listening to a track - will take from it what they interpret.

Part of the reason I make things realistic is, I don’t really want to have to explain my work. What I wish to communicate is done so people can make their own interpretation, and if it’s different to my idea it doesn't matter.

People will say things after a screening that it affects them in a certain way, which is why I don't like to explain what certain things are about. I want them to have that. It limits people's ability to understand something if I say it's "about this." That's happened to us a bunch on this.

I want people to come see my films and enjoy them but at the end of the day you can't control what people think.

You make a movie, and if somebody reads something into it, then great, more power to him.

You finish a film not in the editing, but in the conversations that audiences have with themselves - and in that sense, every viewer is making a slightly different film. And that's wonderful.

It's very important to me that every person takes away their own meaning from a song, and it's why I don't always love spelling out what a song is about for somebody.

People should be free to take whatever they want from music and I think that over time I realized that different people always find different things in my songs, which is really good.

I also feel like it's the right of the people hearing them to have their own interpretations of what these songs mean. Sometimes people will see things that I don't see.

The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.

I don't have a message. You already have all these people telling you how to live, who to be, what to wear, what to drive, what drugs to do - I just want people to see what I see.

I'm not presumptuous enough to feel that people are going to feel what I have in mind, so I tell a story, you know, let them read something, that doesn't change, that as I have said it, you know, so that's the way I feel about the viewer, the viewer has a mind of their own and eyes of their own and they're going to see it their way, I just hope they look.

I don't want to tell what the songs are about for me, because then people can't decide for themselves, which is why I write; it's for you to find your own meaning in. For me it's my story, for someone else it's theirs; if I tell exactly what it means, then it's only my story.

You gotta be careful with message movies. People say "What do you want people to take away from it?" I always say its totally individual.

My album to me is something, but anyone who buys it, it's whatever it is to them. I don't like telling people what specifics are of the record, because that could ruin it as an experience for someone else.

Critics should help people see for themselves; they should never try to define things, or impose their own explanations, though I admit that if... a critic's explanations serve to increase the general obscurity, that's all to the good.

If a Million People See My Movie, I Hope They See a Million Different Movies.

I want to communicate with people, and I want to make something that works, and that people like. I'm never purposefully trying to be antagonistic or shocking or anything that would push an audience away. I'm always hoping to reach as many people as I can.

I'm not interested in trying to have people who might like other kinds of music follow me. I don't want to please them.

None of the ways people were talking about September 11 felt right to me. I don't buy into the way George W. Bush talks about it. I don't buy into the way the 9/11 commission talks about it. It isn't that I don't believe them. It's just that they're not the tellings for me.

What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.

My working life is me doing what I want to do. This is that. I've made movies that people don't go to see.

Everybody wants a big crowd. You get amazed sometimes with certain things that millions of people are watching and you go, "Serious?! Really?!" And then, there are things that you really, really enjoy and not a lot of people are watching. It's very, very hard to predict how it works.

I long ago learned that you can't expect people to interpret the songs in the way they had meant for you, as the writer.

I never try to guess what anyone else will take from a movie. Every movie is such a different experience for each and every person. I don't like it when people try telling people what they should take from a movie. You should go see it with fresh eyes and see for themselves.