Quotes About Perspective

I point out to Ben that, contrary to popular belief, taking action is not always the best course.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

The president can say we're a country at war all he wants. We're not. The military is at war. And the military families are at war. Everybody else is shopping….

Expect nothing, and you will enjoy everything!

There are only two possible outcomes whenever you compare yourself to another, vanity or bitterness, and both are without value.

If you don't want to be in a story, don't know a writer.

Tamzene Donner was a woman at peace with the vagaries of life: "I am as happy as I can reasonably expect in this changing world.

Because we cannot see the roads we have not taken, we become, by defaults, advocates for the path our life is on.

The human animal is remarkably adept at seeing itself as the hero, no matter what the story.

Wanneer een S.S.-man me dood zou trappen, dan zou ik nog opkijken naar z'n gezicht en me met angstige verbazing en menselijke belangstelling afragen: Mijn God kerel, wat is er met jou allemaal voor verschrikkelijks in je leven gebeurd, dat je tot zùlke dingen komt?

When you have an interior life, it certainly doesn't matter what side of the prison fence you're on. . . I've already died a thousand times in a thousand concentration camps. I know everything. There is no new information to trouble me. One way or another, I already know everything. And yet, I find this life beautiful and rich in meaning. At every moment.

De ene mens mag de andere nooit tot middelpunt van zijn leven maken.

All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment.

The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.

Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order.

To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

The first thing we notice about our story is that we can't really see the solid outlines of it--it seems bathed in something of its own. It is wrapped in an atmosphere. This is what makes it shine, perhaps, as well as what initially obscures its plain, real shape.

The frame through which I viewed the world changed too, over time. Greater than scene, I came to see, is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.

He, who had once been the declared optimist, had not once expressed hope. Now it was she who was offering it to him. And it might be false hope

My temperament and my instinct had told me alike that the author, who writes at his own emergency, remains and needs to remain at his private remove. I wished to be, not effaced, but invisible - actually a profound position. Perspective, the line of vision, the frame of vision - these set a distance.

There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer. Humanity itself seems to matter more to the novelist than what humanity thinks it can prove. When

What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set most high.

I have been told, both in approval and in accusation, that I seem to love all my characters. What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set most high.