Quotes About Perspective

I'm a mirror glass for the Muslims as well as the Western world, which looks at me in a slightly different way, but they are looking in the same mirror.

What I really took in in India was that people - even in the slums - were happy with what they'd got. That's something we're not good at in the Western world.

Being a woman writer, I would be deceiving myself if I said I write completely through the eye of a man. There's nothing bad in it, but that does not make me a feminist writer. I hate that name. The tag is from the Western world - like we are called the Third World.

We do not have to be trapped in the simple-minded binaries of the western world.

The impetus for 'The Sisters Brothers' was it occurred to me that there was no neurosis in westerns, or there's a minimal amount of it.

When I used to watch Westerns, I could admire the craft, but I never really loved them; they never spoke to me. Maybe because I'm first-generation American, I'm a woman, and I just didn't see myself reflected.

Westminster Abbey, the Tower, a steeple, one church, and then another, presented themselves to our view; and we could now plainly distinguish the high round chimneys on the tops of the houses, which yet seemed to us to form an innumerable number of smaller spires, or steeples.

It is eerie being all but alone in Westminster Abbey. Without the tourists, there are only the dead, many of them kings and queens. They speak powerfully and put my thoughts into vivid perspective.

When the Egyptians were building the pyramids or the Romans were building roads, or you had the westward push with the railroads, I don't think that the guys on the ground were spending a lot of time thinking, 'Hey, hundreds or thousands of years from now they will look back at the brick I have just laid down here and say that I changed the world!'

Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet.

If you get rid of emotion for a minute and think about the threat of terrorism statistically, it's not even there. The probability that you will slip on a wet floor in your bathroom and die is a thousand times higher than the probability of you dying as a result of terrorism.

I used to always employ South Africans and Aussies and Kiwis - I can't admit this, well I can now, but I couldn't admit it at the time - but I didn't want wet English lads who didn't want to work in the catering trade anyway.

Europeans have it better than the Americans. The Americans work too hard. The balance is out of whack. Europe's hung onto a little bit more of living a life and then working as well.

I come from a background where there would be one mirror above the basin that was used by everyone in the house. If you spent more than five minutes in front of the mirror, you would probably get a whack. My mother was so strict that if anyone complimented me for being pretty, she would not encourage that discussion.

Once we start hitting lyrical themes that can whack you from all these different perspectives, we know we're onto something special.

I go to the Natural History Museum and look at the cage of stuffed starlings there. But my favourite thing is the big blue whale. The scale of it is unbelievable, and makes you feel how insignificant you are as a human being.

When I made 'Whale Rider' - of course, I'm not Maori and have no business, as a white girl, telling people how to be in this movie - I started by learning the language, as best I could.

Let me say right off the bat that I'm not what you would call a 'tree hugger' or a 'bushes and bunnies' environmentalist out to save the planet or the whales - although I do not denigrate that perspective either, and I really like whales.

If I say that I am more interested in preventing the slaughter of large whales than I am in improving housing conditions for people, I am likely to shock some of my friends.

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

One day, the people who work in my kitchen stir-fried chopped Napa cabbage to serve with some meat or fish for their own dinner. I got to thinking: 'What if the cabbage was the most important thing on the plate?'

If I'm hated, so what? If I'm loved, so what?

The idea that a story has to be 'exceptional' in order to be worth telling is curious to me. What if we looked at every single person's story as a site of possibly infinite meaning? What if we came to believe that there isn't hubris or narcissism in thinking your story might be worth sharing - only a sense of curiosity and offering?

If you're playing the character, you could say to yourself in 16 different ways, What if that didn't bother me? What if I knew exactly what he was talking about? What if I didn't get excited?