Interpretation Freedom Quotes

My poems mean what people take them to mean.

I've never found anything to be lacking in a blurry canvas. Quite the contrary: you can see many more things in it than in a sharply focused image. A landscape painted with exactness forces you to see a determined number of clearly differentiated trees, while in a blurry canvas you can perceive as many trees as you want. The painting is more open.

On the last album, I didn't want to disturb the melody with too many stories. This time, I wanted to know if I was able to create images with words, with the sound of words.(...) I think that’s a good thing when the one who is listening, is feeling it in a different way that the one who creates. We are all listening with different perspectives.(...) I don’t want to impose my subjectivity to the listener.

I'm not the writer who says, "You have to say it exactly as I wrote it," because you don't get good work. You want somebody who's going to bring something interesting to it and really create a character with you. You see that with certain actors.

The writer's job, after all, is not to dictate meaning, but to give the reader enough pieces to create his or her own satisfying meaning. The story is truly finished—and meaning is made—not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters the story and fills that little ambiguous space, completing the circuit, letting the power flow through.

I never tell anyone what to take away from a movie.

I'm always interested in hearing how other people read and react to my songs. I hadn't thought of it in just that way. One of the things I love about doing things that are creative is that I feel like it's my right as an artist not to be affected by the reactions of those people that are going to hear my songs. But 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.

I can't control what a reader takes from a story.

A constitutional tradition that works is one that is in a constant state of dynamic evolution. You have a written constitution that says 'x,' but no constitutional system works if it just follows what's in that written constitution and never changes. Interpretation gives it the freedom to change.

A masterpiece doesn't push you around. It lets you make up your own mind about what it means - and change it as often as you like.

A writer loses possession of her work as soon as it's reaches its audience. Each reader brings his own experience and prejudice and imagination to the work. Television adaptation just goes one step further, and the novelist has to learn to let go.

The thing about art for me is that you can go on theorising your work forever, because it's open to interpretation.

I learnt early on that your audience take the songs in the way they want to rather than the way you might want them too.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

Once you finish a film, it doesn't belong to you anymore - it belongs to the audience to interpret it the way they feel like interpreting.

You know, I just don't believe that art is supposed to make sense. I really don't think it's supposed to be analyzed to death. It's left to the listener or looker to get what they can get from it.

The really cool thing about when you're playing a comic book character is that no one knows what he sounds like.

There's always an anxiety about playing literary characters because one of the great joys of reading books is that you can create your own vision of things.

I don't really like to explain my songs.

There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.

It's very hard to impose your beliefs or a specific message about any given movie. I think that audiences always extract what they want from a film even if something isn't overtly political. They may or may not get it, and it's hard to control that.

The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.

What an audience decides about where certain characters come from is really up to them.

In some ways, what I learned is that you can take a character and breathe with them, and it's up to the audience to interpret rather than you putting moral stamp on the character.

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.