Interpretation of Text Quotes

I just rely on the text to speak for itself and then speak it as I believe it to interpret it, and then just know that the rules of the world that we're creating allow for things to come to life, and then just trust in the process of making a film. Hopefully we'll make a sequel, because if we do, we had such a great time as an ensemble, I think the best thing to do would be to just take the whole cast back. This is Iain's idea and I agree with it. Just reincarnate all the characters and put them back into the world. There's no rules. Why couldn't we do that?

Reading is a very different thing than performing. In fact, one of the things I think that doesn't work in books on tape is if the person doing the reading "acts" too much; it becomes irritating to you listening to it.

How then can anyone assert that the Constitution, written in the late 18th century, is a specific and absolutely literal guide for legal or moral behavior in the 21st century?

... teaching cannot be a process of transference of knowledge from the one teaching to the learner. This is the mechanical transference from which results machinelike memorization, which I have already criticized. Critical study correlates with teaching that is equally critical, which necessarily demands a critical way of comprehending and of realizing the reading of the word and that of the world, the reading of text and of context.

A man’s mind is hidden in his writings: criticism brings it to light.

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.

I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that's made by one person, but that's not true. Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together.

I think your text [script] is everything; it's what informs you; it's what gives you the given circumstances. Then you take that and you add your own creativity and your own spin on things and you make it personal. That's what makes that character and that text unique to you, when you personalize it. I think that's where your job as an actor comes in.

Becoming the reader is the essence of becoming a writer.

I find Shakespeare terrifying. When Simon Russell Beale does a speech, I understand every word of it, but if I did the same speech, people would be going, 'Huh? What?'

the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.

Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score.

What believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.

Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer's head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different.

Doing Shakespeare certainly makes you a better actor.

I wonder if it is wise for any of us to read anyone's writings too consistently? No matter how able they may be, they seem occasionally to find it difficult to be consistent, and this tends to give me as a reader the feeling that we are all of us swayed by so much by our momentary impulses and interests, that what we write at any time can not be taken too seriously.

We read privately, mentally listening to the author's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.

One of the beauties about being an actor is that nothing really has to make sense. You just do it and live it and hope it comes out and try to find the truth in what's in the text in your own way and hopefully you can find truth in the text and everything else just comes.

I don't think it takes a brain surgeon to understand how to read a story.

Written language must be considered as a particular psychic reality. The book is permanent; it is an object in your field of vision. It speaks to you with a monotonous authority which even its author would not have. You are fairly obliged to read what is written.

The power of a text when it is read is different from the power it has when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace.

When you look at the piece of paper, and there's just words on there, you interpret it as the actor to whatever you think is right. There may not be the hidden meaning behind the dialogue, because you don't really get to see what's going on.

The world that is a book is devoured bya reader who is a letter in the world's text; thus a circular metaphor is created for the endlessness of reading; We are what we read.

The act of reading is a partnership. The author builds a house, but the reader makes it a home.