Open-Endedness Quotes

Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.

I think great art is always ambiguous and can't be pinned down.

For me the meaning of my work is much more fluid.

All records are riddles, and whatever you may want people to think it's about, it may just be throwing them off. And you don't want it to get in the way of what someone else's understanding is. It's not really about anything. At the same time, it will find some meaning.

A lot of the songs on '2' are pretty personal, but even if I'm writing about something like that, I still tend to keep it pretty simple and open-ended. I like the idea of people listening to my album and it meaning something to me but maybe meaning something else to them.

It's empowering to be asked to look at what's possible, not told how to do it.

Always leave room for the reader to supply meanings.

I never know where I am going, though. That is part of what makes it so wonderful. And after all, who does?

I feel that a world in which you only see what you want to see is incomplete. And as a game creator, I am only here to prepare a game that will expand the breadth of your thinking, and leave the decision between good and evil up to the players.

I've always had an explorative drive to my art, as opposed to wanting to achieve some certain goal.

Nothing is improbable until it moves into past tense.

All good art, to me, is uncertainty.

I'm not Michael Moore. I think Michael Moore wants to tell you how to think. He wants to give you answers. I make movies to raise my own personal questions and not to give answers.

The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.

This is the first time in 10 years I don't know what I'm doing next, and I'm rather enjoying it. Soon I'll be climbing the walls no doubt, but right now, it's not clear, I'm just enjoying the freedom.

I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

The greatest thing about music is putting it out there for people to figure out.

In Japan they prefer the realistic style. They like answers and conclusions, but my stories have none. I want to leave them wide open to every possibility. I think my readers understand that openness.

I try when I'm writing to leave enough "space" for people to have their own interpretation, and not to direct it toward one conclusion. Then the audience would not be reacting, because they are being preached to or lectured at. I don't have that much to say that I think people should listen to me.

So I started out for God knows where. I guess I'll know when I get there.

How could we possibly appreciate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: 'The lady is smiling because she is hiding a secret from her lover.' This would shackle the viewer to reality, and I don't want this to happen to 2001.

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

I don't ever want to feel like my whole life is laid out before me and I know exactly what's gonna happen. That would be so boring.

In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book -- leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity.

You know the actor John Garfield? In one movie he walked up to this train station, the ticket booth, and the guy says, 'Yes, where are you going?' And he says, 'I want a ticket to nowhere.' I thought: that's it. The freedom to do that. I want a ticket to nowhere.