Quotes About Insight

Doing Shakespeare once is not fair to the play. I have been in Shakespeare plays when it's not until the last two or three performances when I even understand certain things. In the old days star actors would travel the world doing the same parts over and over again.

You don't really know much until you get to be 70.

You can be a great researcher, and you can think you have great ideas, but until you're forced to talk to a potential customer, you never really know.

Well, until this very day, I'm still learning.

It's harder to take politics seriously, to understand the issues, than it is to drown it all in a sea of scorn. And while the world cries out for greater analysis and insight, we are distracted by bread and circuses, aka the 'Great British Bake-Off' and 'Tumble.' We should rediscover our tradition of satire. Of speaking truth unto power.

You can't just sit there and do the lines. You have to do something revealing or unusual.

You may think me crude, and probably I am crude, but I am not so crude as I was, for I am clever enough to see that the girl of nineteen who thought herself a genius was only an unusual girl writing her heart out.

About 10 years ago, in an effort to gain a better grasp on McCone's world, I took up the hobby of building fully electrified scale models: first of the legal cooperative where she started out, and then of her own brown-shingled cottage, a pursuit that the more tactful of my friends label unusual, and that the more blunt refer to as obsessive.

Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

I have seen people climbing up and down the ladder of success, and I learnt a lot from them.

The danger that we have right now are people who get the same information as I do and, therefore, think they'll reach the same conclusions that haven't traded as long, don't have bear claws up and down their backs like I do.

The year 2000, I was the richest for three days. So I know up and down.

During my study of happiness, I noticed something that surprised me: I often learn more from one person's highly idiosyncratic experiences than I do from sources that detail universal principles or cite up-to-date studies.

You've got to be up-to-date on what your opponent is doing.

Growing up, I had a face that people wanted to tell things to, and I grew up with adults who had so much to say. They had lived through decades of unbelievable poverty, starvation, political upheaval, chaos.

My mum has always brought the third perspective. She has seen my dad through his ups and downs and I feel that's why she can give me the best advice because she has seen it all as a neutral person.

I don't like getting people upset, so that's not my goal. But I like putting people in situations where how they respond says a lot about them.

It's commonly said that people who've been ill in childhood and who've had an upset education never really regret that they do. It means that you don't look at the world in the way that other people do, and if you were inclined to be a writer, that's a help.

When you see things upside down, the ego can be extraordinarily funny; it's absurd. But it's tragic at the same time.

No, I didn't work it out upside down, I never turned it around.

I mean, I think that - as an actress, in particular, I'm basically a fool, and I see the world upside down.

One way to test a picture's integrity is to turn it upside down - a technique used not only by connoisseurs but also by artists trying to see their work with a fresh eye.

Richard Pryor introduced me to the world of the inner city, and the urban world, and did it hysterically. My favorite comedian, even though we work 180 degrees differently, but funny is funny is funny.