Quotes About Insight

The truths that matter most to us come always half spoken.

What you see is what you see

Sometimes playing stupid opens your eyes to the truth.

Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué."[Letter to Armand Barbès, 12 May 1867]

Smartass Disciple: If there were two masters, which one should I listen to?Master of Stupidity: Use the ears to the one who looks so stupid, eyes to else.

Depth is not something the writer puts into a book; it's something the reader takes out of it.

The exaltation of understanding; then understanding's bottomless regret.

it was the insoluble problems—the false leads and the cold cases—that reflected the true nature of things.

It was not what he expected from a foulmouthed flower of bohemia, but he had a feeling there was both more and less to her than that.

It would please him well enough to amount to no more in the end than a single great organ of detection, reaching into blankness for a clue.

the kind of person who in one moment could guess, with breathtaking coldness, at the innermost sorrow in your heart, and in the next moment turn and, with a cheery wave of farewell, march blithely through a plate-glass window, requiring twenty-two stitches in his cheek.

At the end of every short story the reader should feel as if a cloud has been lifted from the face of the moon.

Accurate prediction of the future, of its technologies and traumas, has always seemed to me to be the least interesting thing about science fiction. The Killer Hook.

Bird of Wide Experience I

there had been times in the past when my sister-in-law's counsel, while never useful, had provided a certain amount of welcome bemusement, like the advice of an oracular hen.

The art of sports writing always amazed me. Nine out of ten times the reader already knows the outcome of your story before reading it. They know who won, they probably even watched the game. But they read about it anyway and you have to find a way to write with an insight and angle that makes it seem fresh.

Writing does for me what you got in that glass does for you. If I can write about it, I can understand it. And I can put it in the ground. That's all I want to do.

Through studying the past we learn our future.

I didn't have all the answers but experience told me that they would come.

When people think they have discovered or earned a certain knowledge on their own, they are more apt to hold on to it.

He also knew that if he waited, somehow he would see, that there was lost light in all places of darkness, and if he found it, it would save him.

It was the Holy Grail of detective work. It had nothing to do with evidence or legal procedure or probable cause. It was just knowing it in your gut. Nothing in her life beat it.

The tunnel was the place where vision narrows and the investigator sees only the bird in hand.

I found out who I was.