Quotes About Insight

Primarily I'm a social commentator rather than someone who's out to get the belly laugh.

If I could sew comedy and philosophy together, then I've done a good job. The primary goal is always going to be laughs and the secondary goal is always going to be saying something without it being a lecture.

Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.

My father, who is now 94, was an actor. The prime thing he taught us as children was to walk through the world with our eyes open.

I must be like the princess who felt the pea through seven mattresses; each book is a pea.

Biology sometimes reveals its fundamental principles through what may seem at first to be arcane and bizarre.

I've read everything printed in English that Freud has written. It helped me a great deal.

Meaning comes from the capacity to see what is not in some simple, objective sense there on the printed page.

Prior to being in 'Carousel,' I had only seen the movie. So, when I read the script, I felt like it was a lot deeper than the movie portrayed it to be.

Prison make you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

It would be like the films I've seen where wardens would decide to be in a jail cell for a week, to get a sense of what it would be like to be a prisoner.

I've been around the block. And I have had the privilege of having been a senior Minister.

Everything, everything, everything! I want to know everything. I want the privilege of being a crone.

There's a kind of integrity to being an observer of a culture. I think Canadians have that privilege innately. We are, like, the observers of the American culture.

I feel like I'm in a privileged position where I get to meet people and talk to them about the most important things in their lives. I appreciate that trust they're putting in me.

That's one of the great privileges, being an actor, is that someone pays you and sends you off to learn about something that otherwise you'd never know about.

After all my probing into the human brain, I should still be aware of mysteries and come up with them myself.

Lack of knowledge... that is the problem.

What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.

Every experience, good or bad, is a learning process.

I learned the process of this kind of acting, how things run, how chaotic it can be, and what kind of different muscles you have to flex.

Writing, for me, is an extension of thinking - it's my way of processing, and only when I've gotten something down on the page have I thought through it fully.

Writing is a way of processing our lives. And it can be a way of healing.

For me, writing is just processing.