Quotes About Insight

Reality isn't straightforward or easily accessible.

One of my side strange abilities is to hear a good song, no matter how it's being performed. Even if you get a bad performance, I can still hear that there's a good song.

How strange a thing like that happens to a man. He dabbles in something and does not realise that it is his life.

My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.

To see the world for a moment as something rich and strange is the private reward of many a discovery.

We have to do what I would call anomalies: we have to look for strange things that show up once in a while. They don't show up all the time. We have to be scanning the horizon, and doing that, once in a while something will show up that makes a lot of sense, and then you act on it.

In a strange way, you have to have a certain amount of distance from a thing in order to be able to write about it.

Throughout my life, I've seen that everybody has had something to teach me and, strangely, it's always something relevant to what I'm going through at that point.

I'm most interested in finding the strangeness and irony in reality. That's my forte.

A colleague once nicknamed me - half mocking - the 'magical stranger' because I get people to tell me things.

I retain what's interesting to me, but I don't have a lot of strategic depth.

Artists, composers and writers...are bent upon capturing and reining in the insights of a fugitive imagination, always inclined to shoot off into the distance, before they can get away, and on bringing them back into the immediacy of material engagement. Like hunters, they too are dream-catchers.

the self-understandings of cultural producers."2 They do so by drawing heavily on interviews and email conversations with some 130 participants (interviews are conducted by myself unless otherwise referenced) as well as the vibrant, sometimes urgent accounts of contemporaneous writers,

To the discovered, the discoverer can be a god.

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.

I think I figured out a thing." "Is it a good thing, or a bad thing?" "Definitely one of the two,

I learned much more about acting from philosophy courses, psychology courses, history and anthropology than I ever learned in acting class.

Talk never goes up in price, it's always free, and you usually get what you pay for.

3D – Arkady had seen it mainly in profile

You know how when you see someone day in, day out, year after year, you don't really notice him getting taller or wider or older or whatever? It can be like that with the way people are on the inside too.

Their attempts to make sense of the world had carried heat but little light.

The FBI was not incompetent or indifferent. It did not know what it did not know.

Unlike almost every other commodity, information becomes more valuable the more it is used. Consider