Quotes About Insight

Teenagers come to things fresh and can really teach us an awful lot.

I don't have anything new to say about teenagers.

As a psychologist, I'm painstakingly careful not to borrow my clients' stories for my fiction - but in a general sense, I'm very much inspired by all the teenagers I've been lucky enough to know and work with.

We're not MTV, we're not teenagers. We kind of have a little bit more of an idea of who we are and what our comedy is because we've been doing it for so long.

Certainly working with teens keeps me up to date with language and with certain kinds of thinking. I often feel like I have to go back to that 17-year-old Chris Crutcher, and that forms the core voice. I can draw on teens from 1964 to 2001 to find a part of the voice I need.

Having teens of my own, who let me just add, I am not trying to impress. I come into contact with a lot of them from time to time, if I am lucky! Just listening to them is like mainlining adrenaline.

I do research for every single book, regardless. For 'Double Dutch,' I learned to jump and learned the scoring system. For 'November Blues,' I interviewed pregnant teens. I like to get up close and personal with the kids involved in the situations I write about.

My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a director.

Wisdom cannot come by railroad or automobile or aeroplane, or be hurried up by telegraph or telephone.

For some reason most critics have a hard time fixing their minds directly under their noses, and before they see the object that is there they use a telescope upon the horizon to see where it came from.

It's interesting: I went 25 years without watching a single television show. I was one of those people, because I was so inside how a television show was made, if I would turn on somebody else's show, I would sit there and analyze it, like, 'Oh, so they had four hours in this location and had to get out and the number of set-ups, etc.'

You can tell a lot about a person by their handwriting.

I have a lot of stories to tell because I've been down a lot of roads people haven't been.

Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.

I see things with my own eyes, just as if they were the first eyes that ever saw, and then I set about to tell, as best I can, just what I've seen.

A good mind should tell the difference between noise and music.

The drums tell me everything. Everything else registers a millisecond later.

Ask an older person you respect to tell you his or her greatest regret.

Put your consumers in focus, and listen to what they're actually saying, not what they tell you.

I'm a fortune teller, but I don't like to know my future.

I find with most of my readers are kind of like me, sort of people who were a little bit naive in life and then learned the hard way that this is what's going on, the political games and most of my readers write to me telling me that the book helped them open their eyes to what other people are doing to them.

Forty is when you actually begin even deserving to be on stage telling people what you think.

But, the thing is, since I always had my own little shop and direct access to the public, I've been able to build up a technique without marketing people ever telling me what the public wants.

Everybody was telling me I should just stand alone on my first project, and I started to see what they were saying.