Quotes About Perspective

You can't control people. You must understand them. You have to know where they're coming from, their beliefs and values, what turns them off, what they're against.

If you ask me what minimalism is really about, I would say that it's the altering of values - enter the small doors of minimalism and come out on the other side with big ideas.

Our morality is based on so many factors: of where we were born, who we were born to, what values were instilled in us, what values we chose, the way that our lives have shaped us. That dictates so much of what we assume is our morality, and also the culture, all of these things.

The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing... You may decide you want to spend your time working as a neurosurgeon, but two months later, you may want to learn to play the saxophone or devote yourself to the church. Death may be a one-time event, but living with terminal illness is a process.

The tourist transports his own values and demands to his destinations and implants them like an infectious disease, decimating whatever values existed before.

Every age sort of has its own history. History is really the stories that we retell to ourselves to make them relevant to every age. So we put our own values and our own spin on it.

If the individual is to be happy in the contemporary order, he must be open-minded with respect to new values and new arrangements.

In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not.

Intellectuals are people who believe that ideas are of more importance than values. That is to say, their own ideas and other people's values.

I made so many films I thought were great and they turned out horrible, and I made films I did not believe in at all, and 'Shadow Of The Vampire' was one of these films I did not believe in during the shooting. And then when I saw it I was surprised what they had made out of it. They edited for quite a long time.

Similarities in the vampire genre are so rampant that there's really no such thing as an original idea - only an original take on an idea that's been done before.

We would all be incredibly boring to a vampire who is 400, 500 years old.

In August of 2002, I survived a car accident. Although I can still see the van speeding toward us, I cannot bring to mind the crash itself - only its aftermath.

Being a purple van man means I have my own perspective on things.

As a private person I think I am now totally different from Ruud van Nistelrooy the footballer.

If Christ can die in a barn, I think the death of a human in a van is not so bad.

I've heard my share of Van Halen. I never liked rock.

I think growing up in Vancouver is a different lifestyle than growing up in most other places.

I'm kind of getting over the whole Manhattan life. I'm from Vancouver, and that means mountains and a lot of space.

After I finished high school I went to Hong Kong and Thailand and spent some time there. Just to get that whole experience of being out of the bubble that I was in from high school in Vancouver, to be able to travel around and be on your own was an amazing experience.

In Vancouver, in Sydney and in Orange County, we live among fluorescent stores and streets so brightly lit that you can read a book after dark; in other places across our global body, there are blackouts and curfews every night.

These days... it's all vanilla sex for me.

I believe that I have such a vanilla life. But maybe I come with a different perspective. I'm always trying to improve myself.

Politics disappears; it vanishes. What remains constant is human life. So I try to develop a perspective in my writing where politics is just one of the pieces of furniture in this furnished world. It is not the purpose. It is not the goal.