Quotes About Insight

All along, I've been writing about our fears, our longings, our fantasies, our ambivalences. When I decided to study psychoanalysis, I did it because I wanted to understand the psychodynamics of it all. Though far from perfect, psychoanalysis offered me a huge, wonderful window on all that.

It changes your perspective to be able to look out the window and see the planet. One of the thoughts that I had when I first got up here was, 'We really do live on a planet, and we are in a solar system, and we are flying through space right now.' I mean, this is something that you know, obviously, but to see the planet - it's amazing.

I like jumping to perspectives that aren't necessarily part of our characters, like suddenly you're in a window, looking from someone's house.

When you're big to the point that you're unhealthy, it's like you see life through a window. You can look at everything going on, but now I can experience it.

There is a saying, 'Eyes are the windows to the soul.' It means, mostly, people can see through someone else by eye contact in seven seconds. I have a habit that if I meet someone I don't know, I'd like to look at her or his eyes on purpose. When my eyes lay on them, I can immediately see their true color.

Our senses are indeed our doors and windows on this world, in a very real sense the key to the unlocking of meaning and the wellspring of creativity.

I think one of the things about railways, if you get on a train you do find - as you come into Paddington, or wherever - you look into people's windows in a way that you just can't do in a car or any other way.

The shoes and the eyes are windows to a woman's spirit.

That's why I have always admired documentaries, because they open windows that can make you understand much better where you come from, much better than fiction, I think.

I need no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul.

If something comes up I might write about it, but without an outlet the whole thing winds down.

When you're writing, I think a big part of writing comes out of an attempt to understand yourself. You're dealing with emotions and thoughts that are native to you. So that probably winds up in your characters.

Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.

One of the things that I'm really proud of is that I have really good timing. It's very easy for me to see what's coming up and it's no coincidence that I went headfirst into wine and then headfirst into new media - none at all.

I get a fizzy thing in my brain, like a nice glass of wine, and I want to know facts and I want to understand.

If you're rich, you can leave a library, a building, or a hospital wing. But writing leaves behind a visceral sense of what it was like to be alive on the planet in a particular time. Writing tells us what it meant for someone to be human.

I learned by standing in the wings and watching established acts on stage.

We always learn more from the losing than the winning.

Each reader needs to bring his or her own mind and heart to the text.

Reading the text of my blog itself is not really the interesting part. The exciting part is how the Internet allows me to be the eyes and ears for the people sending me postings from Africa.

If you see everything through the lens, you are constantly composing pictures. I think in pictures; I don't think in text.

You sit there, and you argue and you argue, and you sort of bully the hell out of the text until you're quite sure what it's revealing, and then you perform it.

You get to crack the code of the play. You get to really pick at it and see, 'What is the story that we're telling?' 'What are the clues in the text that I can find that will help inform what story we're telling?' It's almost like a detective mystery.

The real answers aren't in textbooks; they can be found through experiences.