Quotes About Perspective

Ultimately, because I'm an artist, I can't ever consider myself a nihilist, so I suppose I'm optimistic.

For all the import and message of 'The Iliad,' it's ultimately a story that's meant to be heard, and the person hearing 'The Iliad' determines what it means.

I think that ultimately any effective drama or tragedy tries to put you as much as it can into the protagonist's shoes.

I wanted to be a writer, to write these stories that would make people see the world in a different way. But I ended up going to business school because I thought I could ultimately get to where I wanted to go faster that way.

I do have at home the most ridiculous number of awards for what I have done, which is nice in terms of being patted on the back, yet it does cure you of caring about what other people say about you. Ultimately, you must have your own standard of what is good enough.

I always tend to think just left of center, to remove myself from the world by one step. It is very freeing, and it's a particular way of coming at stories and looking at them that I find the most beautiful stuff that I know comes from, ultimately.

Ultimately, anything is just what you make of it.

It's possible I'm a weird person, you know, and if I could only write for people who are like me, I wouldn't have any audience at all. Ultimately, I'm my audience. I'm writing stories for myself. I don't have kids of my own, and I don't hang around kids all that much. Maybe that puts me at a disadvantage.

Being older now, grown, I'm like, 'What do we really do that's fun?' I'm kind of corny when you think about it. What could I rhyme about? Let me see, um, I gotta pay the rent today.

I've seldom minded other people's opinions, but the other side of that coin is that I've seldom been interested by them, um their opinions about me I mean.

If you were to put me under one umbrella, call me a storyteller.

Mental illness is so hard to define. It's not like an umbrella diagnosis that everyone can fall under, and even one person can have two completely contrasting experiences from it.

You can't know what it's like to be a major league umpire unless you were a major league umpire.

Much as I disliked the un-American idea of marrying a lady with a dowry, I must admit that little Mrs. Godfrey's little private income put everything in a faintly different light.

Being 'contented' ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.

It is a curious foible of a certain type of mind that it is unable to imagine a newspaper editor as one who may, on some public questions, honestly have the same view as that held by other persons.

Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.

People think that dreams are better than reality but this is not always the case; sometimes, because you dream too much, you are unable to see what you have in front of your very eyes.

In memoir, you have to be particularly careful not to alienate the reader by making the material seem too lived-in. It mustn't have too much of the smell of yourself, otherwise the reader will be unable to make it her own.

After finishing a draft, no matter how rough, I almost always put it aside for a while. It doesn't matter if it's a story or a novel, I find that when it's still fresh in my mind I'm either thoroughly sick of its flaws or completely blind to them. Either way, I'm unable to make substantive edits of any value.

'The Names' is a story about a woman who might feel that she's in a kind of maze. She's unable to find her way forward or out because she can't see the whole picture.

I think people have turned terrorists into these larger-than-life devils and so are unable to write about them in the obvious way, which is as human, petty, bumbling.

If I were to say you are crazy, what part of that would you find unacceptable?

I find that people find a way out of misery through humor and it's humor that's often unacceptable to people who are not in quite such a state of misery.