Quotes About Perspective

I was thinking about what it was like for my parents to have a strange kid with a hobby or a pursuit that maybe they weren't that familiar with. It must have been a strange experience - nerve-wracking, in some ways.

I know it shouldn't make a difference, but crossing the dateline, we weren't sure what day it was - it was very strange. Now, I seem to cope with it better.

We live in a strange bubble.

You know, I find it very strange when movies that I made that were just excoriated - I mean that I was just vilified for - are now looked at as classics.

Many people tell me that they don 't know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That's good.

It really is a strange time we're living in, when saying 'Don't kill people' is considered a radical point of view.

It's very strange when people get so focused on what a song means, what actual events inspired a song. That gets people really excited for some reason... But that's what's great about music - however people interpret it, whatever they see, is what I want to be there for them.

Film is a strange thing.

I've been working for, like, 10 years now, which is a very strange thing to say when you're 23.

Words are a strange thing. You once saw an animal and decided it's a 'cat.' But cat is a sound. This cat has nothing to do with the animal. But I have decided it's a cat. So a cat it is.

It's a strange thing to keep having this image of you at the age of seven, 12 or 14 as the one that everyone not only remembers you by, but wants to think in some way that you still are.

Exercising power can do strange things to people. You can become convinced that you're irreplaceable. You can become convinced that you're always right. And I think the danger is the longer you stay in power, the more likely that is to happen.

In a strange way, you have to have a certain amount of distance from a thing in order to be able to write about it.

When I was 12 years old, I was hanging out with 23-year-olds. I was into cartoons and Pokemon, and they're all talking about girls. It was a strange way to grow up.

What a strange world this would be if we all had the same sense of humor.

I grew up thinking that renting is perfectly normal. And then, strangely enough, I never did buy a house. I live in New York City, and I'm still renting. My own personal narrative shows that it is possible to live a respectable life without ever having owned a home.

Throughout my life, I've seen that everybody has had something to teach me and, strangely, it's always something relevant to what I'm going through at that point.

Anytime you see a bit where some stranger does something to me, it's me.

It's one thing for your mum to tell you that you look OK, but she's your mum and she has to tell you you're beautiful. It's not the same as a stranger telling you.

It has been one of my difficulties, in arguing this question out of doors with friends or strangers, that I rarely find any intelligible agreement as to the object of the war.

I once spent an entire night in a hotel in New York looking across the way into someone's apartment where nothing was happening but daily life, a phone call, television watching, staring into the fridge. Seeing how those strangers lived over that small distance and in absolute silence moved me deeply.

Being 36 years old changes you a lot, and so does eight years away from career, fame, needing attention, needing to be loved by strangers on some level. I was loving anonymity. I was loving the fact that I could meet a girl who didn't know who I was. I enjoyed it very much, I have to say.

Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family - that's impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don't empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love.

I used to just go up to strangers and tell them really elaborate stories about who I was and where I was from and try to spice my story, which I didn't think was very exciting at all. That gave me a sense of life, a sense of excitement - but I don't do that anymore.