Quotes About Insight

People have confused playing devil's advocate with being intelligent.

I've always wanted to make music like people write plays, so I was inspired by writers as much as musicians.

Our function as playwrights to some extent is to make audiences see with their ears, because films make us see with our eyes much better.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

Look for a long time at what pleases you, and a longer time at what pains you.

You have to be a lover of books without expecting more of them than they give - a little pleasure, a little insight, a moment of escape, a deepening of your own humanity. Not much else.

I love to read history books, which is where I get my ideas. I also read historical romance for pleasure.

There are plenty of movies that you need to chew on a bit. Movies that you return to and see something different in the second time around.

I've got plenty of advice from a number of other actors. Me? I don't give advice.

I don't have children of my own so I can't say I know the plight of being a parent, but I can kinda understand some of the complexities of it.

You need to know the characters as living, breathing people before you start the plot; otherwise, you'll feel panic, anarchy and chaos.

Certain writers look down their noses at plot, and I think I might have been one of them until I tried it.

For me, plot always comes out of character, so I had to be sure of my characters.

After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn't need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots, and so on. I'd much rather listen always.

Mo Ostin was a great money-maker, but he had the aesthetic interest of a fire plug.

Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Usually, a number of events will be going on around me to start me on a book. What I mean is, I will have read a poem or seen a picture that is lingering in my mind.

What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment.

For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit.

I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.

I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times - and this, I think, is a sense you develop - I can tell that the line wants to continue.

When I'm writing the poem, I feel like I have to close my eyes. I don't mean literally, but you invite a kind of blindness, and that's the birth of the poem.

One does not read a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks with hopes that it will grant him a career in engineering; he does so because poetry helps him see something in the world that he might not have seen before.

I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.