Literal Quotations

When I say art influences me, which it does, it's not at all in a literal form. You go and see exhibitions or collections or meet an artist. It's all a compilation. Every moment, at all times, all this information. Then all this information disappears, and it shows up later in the process.

Effective stream-of-consciousness narration is the product of verbal precision, not just of literal documentation. It is decidedly not a matter of unedited free-association.

When it comes to literal nourishment, the food we eat, life begets life.

You know it's my job to visualize, what is literal or audible, so I designed all the characters, and I designed what they do and how they should do it and so on.

The world appears rectilinear, but is in fact curvilinear - a literal truth in physics, and a metaphorical one in metaphysics.

People ask me about 'The Hurt Locker' a lot, and it's an incredible piece of filmmaking - as are 'Band of Brothers' and 'Platoon' and 'Full Metal Jacket' and 'Apocalypse Now.' But they're not necessarily true to war in a literal sense. What they are, really, are brilliant movies about Hollywood's idea of war.

A lot of the lyrics I write involve images that just swing the song in a way that feels really good to me and there isn't a literal explanation. They're not riddles for the listener to solve.

In a very literal way, of course, Shakespeare did change the course of history: when it didn't fit the plot he had in mind, he simply rewrote it. His English histories play fast and loose with chronology and fact to achieve the desired dramatic effect, re-ordering history even as it was then understood.

Varese, Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, Leger, Gleizes, Severini, Villon, Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, Marie Laurencin, Cocteau and many others were to me household names in the literal sense - names of familiar figures around the house.

Glamour is a beautiful illusion - the word 'glamour' originally meant a literal magic spell - that promises to transcend ordinary life and make the ideal real. It depends on a special combination of mystery and grace. Too much information breaks the spell.

I do not consider myself a literal genius.

In a certain way, it's the sound of the words, the inflection and the way the song is sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words.

The literal resurrection of every soul who has lived and died on earth is a certainty, and surely one should make careful preparation for this event. A glorious resurrection should be the goal of every man and woman, for resurrection will be a reality.

When you want to transcribe an idea truthfully from the page to the screen, it is not necessarily best to be particularly literal about it. It can be hard to convince people, specifically writers, of that.

There is no part of the executive branch that more exists on the outer edge of executive prerogative than the American intelligence community - the intelligence community, CIA, covert action. My literal responsibility as director of CIA with regard to covert action was to inform the Congress - not to seek their approval, to inform.

Working for Disney for the last eight and a half years, people come and go - production staff and actors. I stepped onto the sound stage and it was a literal time warp.

I've never had any intentions about anything. That's why I am where I am today, which is neither here nor there, in a literal sense.

My literal responsibility as director of the CIA with regard to covert action was to inform the Congress - not to seek their approval; to inform.

My favorite records are, like, The Pretty Things' 'Parachute' and 'S.F. Sorrow' and The Mothers of Invention's 'We're Only in It for the Money' and The Kinks' 'Village Green Preservation Society' - these records that have a story - even if it's not a literal story - because of how they're sequenced and flow. It's like a novel with sound.

Never thought that 'body slam' would become a literal phrase in politics.

But French legislators aren't just looking at Apple. They're looking ahead to a time when most entertainment is online, a shift with profound consequences for consumers and culture in general. French lawmakers want to protect the consumer from one or two companies holding the keys to all of its culture, just as Microsoft holds the keys to today's desktop computers... Apple may not qualify as a literal monopoly -- there are lots of ways to get music and buying online accounts for only a small fraction of total music sales. But the sliver it does control it controls almost completely, and it's not out of the question to suggest that this sliver will ultimately become the only way people will buy music in the future.

I did have a literal shed of fan mail once. It was literally filled with, like, 25 of those giant mail cartons.

Have the physical, literal ability to intercept communications if they have a warrant.

God truly is our Father, the Father of the spirits of all mankind. We are his literal offspring and are formed in his image. We have inherited divine characteristics from him.

I was always at heart a novelist and wanted to tell a bigger story, so I wanted to create people who told other kinds of truths than literal truths.

I think a really rich world to live in is where you're thinking in terms of human behavior and human types and not being super literal. In order to see the deeper truth, you need to break out of literal frame of mind.

I think that 'Station to Station' is a nomadic project not only in a literal sense, as it's traveling by train from place to place. Some of these places are New York City or Los Angeles, but some of these places are rather off-the-grid places.

I think the most attractive people are the confident ones, regardless of their literal appearance, so I strive for that. Basically, I think you'll always be the size your body needs to be if you only eat if you are hungry. If you never eat for any other reason, you'll be just the right size for your body.

I was tormented. Fear and trembling. And a sense of doom. A literal belief in hell. Hell for eternity. With devils chasing you for eternity with pitchforks. I trembled. I couldn't go to sleep for fear I might die and wake up in hell. I was in agony." ()

When the code of laws is once fixed, it should be observed in the literal sense, and nothing more is left to the judge than to determine whether an action is or is not conformable to the written law.

We don't know what we are going to do with this. It's really random with all the ways that we're thinking. Some are very literal and some are very non-literal, but we have no idea where we're going right now.

I create fictional narratives, but it's based on literal people.

When politicians began to see that every last thing that they did in public could be broadcast to a mass audience, the fact that the stakes were so much higher now that every moment became fraught caused them to become more cautious, and the consultants very gradually but inevitably became literal reactionaries.

We think we think in a very literal way, but if you really ponder it, you don't think in a literal way. You're seeing in a literal way, and you're going from point A to point B, but if you really consciously think back at what was going through your mind when you went from point A to point B, you'll find that it's a very abstract process.

Breath does, in fact, connect us all in a very literal way. Take a breath now. And as you breathe, think about what is in your breath. There perhaps is the CO2 from the person sitting next-door to you.

Even the Impressionists, the most innovative artists of their time, sought to paint realistically. They believed that their freer way of portraying the visible world was truer to life than the literal realism of the 'salon painters' who dominated French art throughout the 19th century.

I started doing sculpture in 1959. I had no commissions then. They were painted, similar in style to the paintings... At a certain point, I decided I didn't want an edge between two colors, I wanted color differences in literal space.

It was the point where things became much more abstract and less literal than in the bulk of the film, which was hardcore rockets and space and planets - all a fairly straightforward evolution from what I had been doing before.

A literal view of the Bridge of Sighs is beautiful in itself, but our educational interpretation declared that the bridge was so named because it was where convicted prisoners had their final view of the city.

They really went through and researched every single song and tape and looked at each individual album. The idea was to make a record that complements the film, that wouldn't be a literal soundtrack to the film.

It really didn't show they were complying with what the literal terms of the ordinance were.

The Biblical record itself makes it plain that the days of creation are literal days, not long indefinite ages. If he wished to convey the idea of long geological ages, however, he could surely have done it far more clearly and effectively in other words than in those which he selected.

A painting... is just one image. It allows you to elaborate, dwell on that one picture, go off on it because no further images are forced upon you. But the motion picture is always changing. So what you have to do is create some kind of eye field, an abstract form in a literal sense that tries to emulate what the brain is perceiving, not what the eye is seeing.

In a war without aim, you tend not to aim. You close your eyes, close your heart. The consequences become hit or miss in the most literal sense.

In a literal sense, even a private company, of course, cannot do everything that it wants without some discussion with government. As a good corporate citizen, Severstal discussed the idea of a merger with Arcelor with the Russian government.

In a very literal sense, the whole world's a stage for them.

I'm used to playing literal story lines and dealing with people's emotions. I had a story where I was put in a dungeon for four weeks. That to me is such an unlikely scenario, I had a very hard time making my imagination go there. I find myself not actually playing it. I will show up for it.

In workshopping short stories I learned how to get character down, and how to work with ratios of literal to fantastic to make a world that people can believe in even if it's a little wild or out there.

Fanciful spiritualizing, so far from yielding God's meaning, actually obscured it. The literal sense is itself the spiritual sense, coming from God and leading to Him.

Heaven is not as narrowly literal-minded as hell.

All of my songs are about me and my experiences. They're very literal.

The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.

The leaders of the Catholic Church endorsed The Exorcist ; virtually promoted it as much as they could. The Cardinals of New York and Los Angeles and Chicago and the other big cities, all over the world, they endorsed it because it represents a literal depiction of the Roman ritual of exorcism which still exists in the Catholic faith. It's still there. The power of faith to drive out demons. And this film showed that and they embraced it.

Sci fi allowed us to be more true to the western than maybe even doing a literal western.

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification

About the Time of the End, a body of men will be raised up who will turn their attention to the Prophecies, and insist upon their literal interpretation, in the midst of much clamor and opposition