Quotes About Insight

Every science fiction is a reading of the period that produced it.

This is what graphics are all about: showing the details and the patterns all at once.

People who have no emotional stake in a decision can see what needs to be done sooner.

And remember to ask questions, and notice everything, the orchids and the fruit flies, the children rummaging for food in piles of shit, and the ibis that flies across the moon at dusk. Let us go at least as far as the falls.

Thinking is an art because it requires you to listen to your thoughts and then do something with them.

I have little tolerance for noise and stupidity.

So much of what we see and hear is not the truth of any given situation; sometimes it's necessary to close the eyes and be still, to extend our awareness beyond what we've been conditioned to believe is our field of sensory operation. Only then can we learn the patience to trust that all the information that we need will come to us.

Getting out any weekly magazine requires many hours of reading, choosing, discarding, and thinking beyond the obvious.

'Eureka' moments are very, very rare in my experience. It normally takes several weeks of experiments to tease out the truth, even when you have a really pretty good idea of what is going on.

I find out as much from the guy in backstage TV as I do from my C.F.O. Anybody can e-mail me. I do town halls with employees at least once every eight weeks. I'm out there, and it makes a huge difference.

Don't start writing your novel until you know your characters very, very well. What they'd do if they saw somebody shoplifting. What they were like at school. What shoes they wear. Spend days - weeks, months - being them until they thicken up and start to breathe.

I used to work as a tour guide for Americans. I'm convinced that even after four weeks on the road they had no idea where they had been. They were in a bubble.

I rode with four street-clothes cops in the East Village. I spent six weeks riding with them every day - in street clothes, with a vest underneath.

I spent a lot of time with the LAPD. I spent six weeks training, weapons training, ride-alongs, surveillance, interviewing them, in all different departments and divisions.

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

'Tis best to weigh the enemy more mighty than he seems.

Pondering, which means to weigh mentally, to deliberate, to meditate, can achieve the opening of the spiritual eyes of one's understanding.

The irrationality of disgust suggests it is unreliable as a source of moral insight. There may be good arguments against gay marriage, partial-birth abortions and human cloning, but the fact that some people find such acts to be disgusting should carry no weight.

I've been to some kind of weird places in America. I've been to Idaho.

I always think about my jokes as like I'm driving down a street, trying to go into all the culs-de-sacs along the way. I'm just taking a thoughtful, weird journey.

In a weird way, I live vicariously through the characters I play as an actor.

What's weird is to hear someone else talking about your mannerisms.

Often, people think that individual data is the most valuable thing they can collect. But it's not useful to know what I am doing or where I am, unless you're particularly interested in me, which is weird. But it is very useful to know what a population of people are doing.

I'd have these weird experiences where I'd just be walking down the street with this chord progression in my head, this happened more than a few times, and I'd walk home and find a fax in my machine and it would match the music in my head.