Quotes About Perspective

The books I read, if they intrude on my writing, do so as weather will pass through and touch a landscape - affecting it, yes, but only now and then leaving a permanent mark.

L.A. can make you feel like you've already made it. You're living off 40 dollars a week; it's nice weather. You go outside on your bike; you go to the coffee shop, and everybody is doing nothing. It doesn't leave a lot of room for ambition.

Getting upset about Netflix, to me, is like getting upset about the weather. It's just something that's happening, and we have to decide what we feel about it.

You will enjoy the TV and radio forecast much more if you stop taking it as advice and simply treat it as a short poem about the weather.

Writing/reading is like visiting another person's brain. And a short book or article is like a short stay. You come in, have a coffee, talk about the weather or sports, and then move on.

I learned personally and in football. Until you're away, and you have no family, the food, the weather, you don't know what you have, and you learn to value things.

Scottish people don't take themselves too seriously. I think you have to be like that when you're from a place where the weather is bad.

Though my books are written from a historical perspective, I have goon so far back that I am in the realm of prehistorical speculation rather than simple historical fact to weave my stories around.

Some critics argue that a tsunami of hogwash has already rendered the Web useless. I disagree. We are indeed inundated by online noise pollution, but the problem is soluble.

If I were to write Web now, it would be a much, much darker book.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

I never open the newspaper, never. I never go to a website; I never turn on the T.V. hoping to find something I can attack. It isn't what I do. I defend.

When you work with web design companies in San Francisco, you end up with a bunch of twenty-somethings who have their own cultural peculiarities, including obscurity for its own sake. You give those guys a website for a banking institution and they screw it up, because they are designing for themselves.

I found this website, The Experience Project, which has people write first-hand experiences of their life and what they went through. There would be a 75-year-old man who talked about his childhood or a 15-year-old girl who talked about what she is going through right now. It was amazing to read their personal thoughts.

When I was at MIT, they had a beta test of Mosaic, the first popular browser. I remember looking at it, and there was a weather map or something. Now, in fairness to me, there weren't any websites then. But I remember saying, 'This is stupid - what's the point?' Now, of course, it's obvious.

I've always read the papers but didn't feel I knew enough in the past. But doing the research and looking at newspapers and online websites gives you a 360-degree view of the news.

For a girl, the wedding is when you're married. For a guy, it's when you get engaged. It takes a real aggressive human being to back out between the ring and the wedding.

You can give poor people this royal wedding to watch and make them feel good about themselves, or you can give them something useful like, I don't know... a toaster.

When planning your wedding you make so many decisions: 'Do I want this fork or that fork?' But in the end people aren't going to remember what napkin holder you choose.

If you had asked me when I was 28 and in my wedding dress if I ever thought I would end up in my forties flipping my husband the bird over potato chips, I'd say you were crazy.

About 80 percent of the photos on Flickr are public and searchable by everyone. In one sense, it's a place where people upload snapshots from the family reunion, wedding or the birth of a baby or something like that, but it's also a place where people go to show what the world looks like to them.

Things like, when a total stranger says, 'I want you to record something for my forthcoming wedding,' that can be a bit tiresome. But it's a high-class problem. It doesn't hurt my feelings.

Sometimes it hurts when I see my role being edited. But that wasn't the case with '15 Park Avenue... ' or 'Monsoon Wedding.'

You know you're getting old when you go to more funerals than you do weddings.