Quotes About Insight

I turn to books for a feeling of companionship: for somebody knowing what I have known.

I always compare human beings to animals. It's a nice way to figure out who they are.

Advice is always awesome because it never makes any sense when you compare it all together. It always contradicts other advice. I love advice.

You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you're a writer.

If you can understand, you can feel compassion.

There's an arc to an action sequence, and you need to come out the other end knowing your character better, and maybe the story has moved forward in a compelling way.

A lot of people ask me, 'Are you born a writer?' And I don't think it's necessarily true. I just think what you either have or you don't is this ability to see something that's complex and worth talking about.

I know that Liz Meriwether likes to keep things as honest and complicated as life can be, which is really fun for all of us.

I admire Turgenev, Camus, Proust and Shakespeare, but I've also learnt a lot about writing from composers and artists.

It's really been enlightening for me to work with composers because I used to think that everything in the music was exactly what the composer meant. Well, it's what the composer meant in that moment when they wrote it.

Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way.

I don't sit down in front of my computer screen and think, 'Right. Today I shall begin a story set in this or that period of history.' I just get ideas from the world around me.

I think a conceptual idea comes to me first - something I've been mulling over a lot right before I feel like writing a book - and then the characters start to develop around it.

A lot of times you go to a concert, and when you leave, you don't know anything more about the act then when you got there.

I have confidence in people's basic common sense.

There is nothing clever about confusion.

Comedy comes from confusion.

Connecting with Canadians isn't about what you say, it's about what you're listening to. It's about what you understand.

A connection between poetry and blindness is a classical trope.

If you don't make errors, how can you be conscious?

Whenever I speak, I talk to the collective consciousness of my audience.

Simple idea with powerful consequences: everyone who intersects your life knows something you don't.

I relax by looking at things and reading about things. Even the simplest thing can reveal a great deal about the world around us. It relaxes me greatly to sit back with my feet up and look around my study at the everyday things that surround me.

It's very difficult to be objective about yourself and your own circumstances, but one thing I do know about is that I grew up surrounded by storytellers.