Interpretive Skills Quotes

A conductor has to know how to translate music into a communicative force that makes the listener want to hear what he has to say.

...if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal?

Nowadays people's visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will.

Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors.

I have faith in an audience being able to interpret complex material.

To be a textual critic requires aptitude for thinking and willingness to think; and though it also requires other things, those things are supplements and cannot be substitutes. Knowledge is good, method is good, but one thing beyond all others is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders and brains, not pudding, in your head.

There is an art of reading, an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

It is so cool having complete control over something because, with acting, it's words written by other people that you perform; you do something that's completely not yourself.

Wise men read very sharply all your private history in your look and gait and behavior. The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. The tell-tale body is all tongues. Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces which expose the whole movement.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

With every character, I just bring something that I can make my own.

There's always the joy of the performance and fine-tuning new interpretations. Over the years, we've all grown as musicians, so obviously there is a lot of subtlety that wasn't there in the first place.

You have to channel the interpretation and performance into 100 people. And with the audience, the critics.

The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!

Pastors need to know what's going on in the world and what has been going on for 4,000 years. We need a way to read Scripture which is imaginative, interpretive.

Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances. And it's being able - I can't tell you how one does, but one tries to read those circumstances correctly.

We read often with as much talent as we write.

My job is to bring to life the character, not to put the words on the paper.