Quotes About Insight

We try to do a great job of understanding the opposing hitter and his tendencies. Maybe understand the hitter better than he knows himself.

Perhaps the best thing about biographies is that they enable us to slip the strictures of time and provide a bracing corrective to our tendency to see everything in the dark glass of our own era, with all its blind spots, motes, beams, and distortions.

I'm one of these people who tends to think that the ordinary people are more fascinating than the celebrities and even the politicians.

We are a very youth-driven culture, and I don't really know why because wisdom tends to come with more years, not fewer.

I just enjoy watching tennis. And there's things that you can learn from the men's and the women's game.

You don't need to spend tens of millions of dollars on political consultants to tell you what you think when you already know what you think.

I've always had that knack for staying pretty even keel and the more the situation gets tense the more I see things clearly and I think that's just a knack that I've always had.

The common wisdom is that only about 1 percent of a novelist's research ends up in his or her book. In my experience, it's even less - closer to a tenth of a percent.

The biggest learning during my tenure as a captain was that, a lot of time, I used to think that this is common sense. But no, there is nothing called common sense.

I look at something like 'Short Term 12,' and that character has a lot of pain, and I wouldn't have known how to portray that if I hadn't experienced pain myself.

People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Women on the whole are often not as shallow as men are. They can be, but they cut through things a little more easily than men do in terms of that superficial stuff.

Kids don't read as much as you'd like them to, just in terms of seeing the world from different perspectives. I mean, that's the great thing about books, still. Here's television, here are the movies, and it's pretty limited in terms of the perspectives.

In terms of the characters I think are really fun to play, a lot of times it's someone in my head saying 'I know that woman.'

The second half of the '60s really was a kind of learning period, in terms of writing, for me.

There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight.

The terrible thing about sunlight is it shows the dirt.

While I don't satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I'm terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think that's true about many of us.

I see so much more than I used to see. The effect has been to depress and sadden and hurt me terribly.

Sometimes you learn more from films that aren't terribly successful and, indeed, sometimes you learn more from real disasters than you do from the ones that succeed.

Are we asking terribly much of people to be curious and interested in the female experience from the female perspective?

People confuse being full of words with being terribly intelligent and informed.

I was fortunate to be part of a very successful show on CBS in 1986. I switched to NBC for eight years and through these experiences have gotten terrific insight into television; it's a fascinating medium.