Quotes About Perspective

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.

We are closer to the ants than to the butterflies. Very few people can endure much leisure.

I'm very happy being me, although sometimes I'd love to be a bird so that I could fly.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

Looking at flowers, simple things in life. I don't need to look at gold and a castle; sometimes its very simple things that are very beautiful. I am keeping my eyes fresh to find beauty in many places, and in gold, too, sometimes!

Being elected to Congress, though I am very grateful to our friends for having done it, has not pleased me as much as I expected.

Mortality is very different when you're 20 to when you're 50.

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

There was not a lot of rock n' roll in the house. Our parents didn't think it was very groovy, and I tend to agree with them. If you grew up with Charlie Parker, Bill Haley wasn't very hip.

I was inadvertently raised in the 'gay community.' I had straight parents, but I spent massive amounts of time at a very early age with gay, theater-hopeful thirty-somethings.

From the age of five, I was organizing everybody's everything. If I didn't like the way it looked, I'd rearrange it. From a very early age, I saw life from my point of view.

It matters so much that from a very early age we encounter different kinds of different people, because that's what real life should be about as well.

I was lucky in the sense that I started work very young but had a solid family base provided by my mother. She instilled a strong sense of perspective and humility in me from a very early age.

For a very long time now, we've seen things one way, which is through the eyes of men. Quite frankly, I'm a little bit bored by our stories and the way we perceive things.

I was very anti-French everything for a very long time.

If I hear a story or a fact about somebody I don't know and have never met, it's like getting a hollow vessel that you can fill up with whatever you want. That's more tempting to me than to try to replicate what I actually know.

When you talk to family and friends, they can't tell you anything from an impartial point of view because they have a vested interest in you.

If you're making a film about a band or a songwriter or whomever, there's a publisher, there's a record label, and there are people who are vested interests in that film. But with back-up singers, because they did stuff for everybody, there's no one party that has any vested interest in seeing the story told.

Once you've reached the point where you can pay rent, you can go to the vet and you can go to the grocery store, after that point it's all the same. I don't have the appetite for a decadent lifestyle.

It's easier to get people to talk to you if you're a vet and you want to interview a vet about war. Sometimes they open up a little bit easier.

I was a veteran, before I was a teenager.

I'm OK being the veteran, but I'm still just a kid.

There's a tradition in war writing that the veteran goes over and sees the truth of war and comes back. And I'm skeptical of that.