Quotes About Perspective

I think to many people the term 'activist film' implies a film with a single point of view - something designed to provoke outrage and urge action on a particular issue - sort of the film equivalent of a rally. 'If a Tree Falls' is not that kind of film.

I realized that even though I had this urge, this longing, to write about other people, in order for it to be emotionally gripping, I needed to be in there somehow.

You feel a sense of urgency, especially at my advanced age, when you're staring into the grave.

I'm a little more measured. That sense of urgency I thought accompanied things - it can take a little longer. You have to take the long view.

A weird side effect of being in close proximity to death is an urgency.

For me, reworking the past over and over again is a way not to trivialise the garments and not to obsess over hem lengths. What I am interested in, as a matter of fact, is telling a story and, if someone sees fragments of other stories in it, be my guest. I don't have to justify myself. What is urgent for me is what I want to say.

But you can make good radio, interesting radio, great radio even, without an urgent question, a burning issue at stake.

Our kind of research might be one of the first projects to go. Our work is not urgent; it's not the cure for cancer or Alzheimer's. But we have a way of understanding human life that you can't get anywhere else, and it lays the foundation for important, actionable things.

I think one of the bigger issues with modern-day people is that we don't give enough credit to people from history as being real. We almost treat them as these rarified beings that didn't exist the way that we do with emotions and urges and drives.

We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

Sometimes you have to disconnect to stay connected. Remember the old days when you had eye contact during a conversation? When everyone wasn't looking down at a device in their hands? We've become so focused on that tiny screen that we forget the big picture, the people right in front of us.

My concern with religion is that it allows us by the millions to believe what only lunatics or idiots could believe on their own. That's not to say that all religious people are lunatics or idiots. It's anything but that.

Remember, we see the world not as it is but as we are. Most of us see through the eyes of our fears and our limiting beliefs and our false assumptions.

We meet aliens every day who have something to give us. They come in the form of people with different opinions.

We turn the Cube and it twists us.

I support gay marriage. I believe they have a right to be as miserable as the rest of us.

Stories teach us empathy. They reveal to us ourselves in the skins of others.

I've often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us, unless it's inside a frame.

We're so complex; we're mysteries to ourselves; we're difficult to each other. And then storytelling reminds us we're all the same.

History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.

Nature hasn't gone anywhere. It is all around us, all the planets, galaxies and so on. We are nothing in comparison.

It's lack that gives us inspiration. It's not fullness.