Quotes About Perspective

It seems to me that any sensible person must see that violence does not change the world and if it does, then only temporarily.

Vietnam helped me to look at the horror and terror in the hearts of people and realize how we can't aim guns and set booby traps for people we have never spoken a word to. That kind of impersonal violence mystifies me.

I was very interested in the relationship between the man who speaks and the woman who listens. I was drawn to the idea that the relationship between a man and a woman can be something like a war itself, very cruel and violent.

Justice is always violent to the party offending, for every man is innocent in his own eyes.

It's my view that children are violent, dirty, corrupt anarchists. Just adults-in-waiting, basically.

The media chooses to portray the most extreme and violent aspects of a place. I do the opposite and portray the normality.

The first thing you need to know, in order to establish some perspective and avoid panic, is that the violent government excesses we're seeing today are far from unprecedented.

My father was a soldier. He was a frogman in the special forces in Denmark before I was born, and always the reality of that inspired me. My mom is very left-wing, classic socialist, and she always talked about the solders as almost crazy, violent, sick people, and I want to confront that because its very judgmental, and I'm not sure it's true.

My grandfather was hit over the head by a crane boom in Seattle. Some of the family claimed he was never a violent, crazy person before that. Some say he was. It depends who you believe.

Men view life to be as precious as women do, and to say that men have a more violent nature is insulting to men.

Is there a more violent book than the Bible?

I'm not any more sexist, racist or violent than the world around me.

We may pass violets looking for roses. We may pass contentment looking for victory.

And I also think it's a violin when you're selling it and a fiddle when you're buying it.

I enjoy the life I have now, but I also enjoy doing regular stuff. I can't pull up to the club and stay outside no more. I can't be at anybody's table. A picture or video can go viral, and it can be misinterpreted.

I was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, for a while, about which the less said the better, and then I was in the Mediterranean, about which the more said the better.

At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.

Virginia Woolf was wrong. You do not need a room of your own to write.

I admire Virginia Woolf so much that I wonder why I don't like her more. She makes the inner things real, she does illumine, and she makes relationships realities as well as people. But I remember the intensity, the thrill, with which I read 'Passage to India.' How I would have hated anyone who took the book away from me.

I write about Texas, New York, California and Virginia, and they're all important places in my repertoire.

I actually believe more in outer space in Virginia, because I can look up at the sky and count the stars.

We have good history in Virginia... and we have history that's not good and I don't think we can shy away from any of it. We must tell it all, we must put it in perspective.

Putting you into a virtual world really allows you to think differently.

I love how close you are to current affairs and social issues here in England. Out in L.A., you have to make an effort to look outside that little microcosm. It's almost like it's a virtual reality to imagine a problem there.