Quotes About Insight

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

I've always been kind of a voyeur.

I'm a real voyeur.

I had a job once selling encyclopedias, and that was an interesting job because I learned a lot about people's vulnerabilities and how salesmen take advantage of them.

Somewhere, the audience relates to my characters and their vulnerability. I believe they see themselves in me.

I don't think I'm a chameleon. I can feel where people are coming from, what makes them tick, where they are vulnerable, what makes them feel good about themselves. I get just as much out of it as they do. I love connecting.

I love reading other people's diaries, especially someone like Virginia Woolf's - such a formidable woman that it's a revelation when she shows you a more vulnerable side of herself.

I tend to find you have to be fairly vulnerable to get something... to get a perspective worth having. Which can be controversial. But I find telling someone what you're thinking about, what you want, and what you're afraid of can often help them give guidance.

Usually the wacky people have the breakthroughs. The 'smart' people don't.

But I always need to identify with a character to write about him or her - and by 'identify,' I mean see the world through that person's eyes and have a strong sense of the inner logic of their acts and decisions, wacky or wrongheaded though they might be. In that sense, I think there's some of me in all of them.

In the divine Scriptures, there are shallows and there are deeps; shallows where the lamb may wade, and deeps where the elephant may swim.

Wait for those unguarded moments. Relax the mood and, like the child dropping off to sleep, the subject often reveals his truest self.

Listen, wait, and be patient. Every shaman knows you have to deal with the fire that's in your audience's eye.

Sometimes we wait for thunderclaps, drumrolls, and clarion calls to alert us to what's important when, actually, it's most often the subtle and persistent signals around us that make the most difference.

It takes a lot of experience of life to see why some relationships last and others do not. But we do not have to wait for a crisis to get an idea of the future of a particular relationship. Our behavior in little every incidents tells us a great deal.

At synods, I usually wait about a week before I speak. First I listen. I feel the temperature. I listen to what has been said, what has not been said, and what I think needs to be said at that point.

If you wait for customers to tell you that you need to do something, you're too late. Good business leaders should be half a step ahead of what customers want, i.e. they don't actually quite know they want it. That's what innovation's about. With Plan A, we didn't wait for the consumers to tell us.

I have stocked shelves, waited on tables, and bartended. I have been a salesperson at many levels. Each giving me a unique view of what made a company successful and, even more importantly, what made a company fail.

How someone treats a waiter or doorman can tell you so much about a person.

I mean, I've had bartenders and waiters and waitresses make a comment about a joke of mine, like pointing out some sort of logic error or something that I've never even thought about, and they're right.

Most decisions are not binary, and there are usually better answers waiting to be found if you do the analysis and involve the right people.

So, the combination of looking at lots of different people and how they react to each other and how they relate to each other and waiting for that inspiration is the thing that allows me to keep writing.

Men may know many things by seeing; but no prophet can see before the event, nor what end waits for him.

To him that waits all things reveal themselves, provided that he has the courage not to deny, in the darkness, what he has seen in the light.