Quotes About Insight

Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some meaning therein.

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are.

You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you've observed in the world.

If you stop trying to control your mind so much, you'll have intuitive hunches about what this or that character is all about.

A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader

clarity of vision—especially

And I'd stand there trying to see it, the way you try to remember a dream, where you squint and it's right there on the tip of your psychic tongue but you can't get it back. The image is gone. That is one of the worst feelings I can think of, to have had a wonderful moment or insight or vision or phrase, to know you had it, and then to lose it.

Your job is to present clearly your viewpoint, your line of vision. Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense.

When what we see catches us off guard, and when we write it as realistically and openly as possible, it offers hope.

And the story begins to materialize, and another thing is happening, which is that you are learning what you aren't writing, and this is helping you to find out what you are writing.

He said that when he sees little kids sitting in the backseat of cars, in those car seats that have steering wheels, with grim expressions of concentration on their faces, clearly convinced that their efforts are causing the car to do whatever it is doing, he thinks of himself and his relationship with God: God who drives along silently, gently amused, in the real driver's seat.

As Father Ed Dowling said, sometimes heaven is just a new pair of glasses. When we put them on, we see the awful person, sometimes even ourselves, a bit more gently, and we are blessed in return. It seems, on the face of things, like a decent deal.

It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

Looking ahead is far more constructive than looking behind, said Robinton. He held his clenched fist up. I'd all the facts in my grasp and I couldn't see the water for the waves.

La experiencia real es el conocimiento

Sometimes the body experiences a revelation because it has abandoned every other possibility.

La propia ignorancia sigue creciendo precisamente al mismo ritmo que la propia experiencia.

One can look deeply for meaning or one can invent it.

With a new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women.

That is the magical thing about books. You can listen to all the greatest people who have ever lived, anywhere in the world, in any civilization. You can see what is completely different about them, things you never imagined.

Be aware that you can truly help people only by aiding them to become what they are, not what you are. I have heard you say 'If I were you, I would do this—or that.' 'I' am never 'you'—and my solutions may not be yours.

The imagination conjures so many things, and one feels the pain of them all, until one knows.