Quotes About Insight

And Clinton was like that - he saw the whole playing field. He didn't just see the event that he was at or the circumstances of that week or that month. He saw the whole playing field all the time.

My role 14 years ago in Richard III - that was the first time I played a bad guy and learned a lot about it - they have all the fun!

People say 'teenage girls aren't so clever. Your characters should be less articulate to reflect our youth.' People who say that aren't spending time with teenagers.

It was genuinely eye-opening for me to read Tolstoy or Steinbeck or Colette for the first time and to feel as though they were speaking to me.

I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.

I did my 40 years in Washington, 40-plus, and it's time to pause and reflect and think about what I've seen and done.

Half the time I pick up a book, that's what I'm trying to get.

Probably my favorite thing about watching a movie that I'm in the first time is to see all the things I didn't know were happening in a scene around me.

The difference between the first time I read something and the tenth time I read something is generally pretty profound. Even if the script is the same, just the way that I read it is different.

We have everything we need, in fact, except the most important thing of all — time to think and the habit of thought.

It's my luck that every time I feel I completely comprehend God's plan, I don't have a pencil with me.

A knowing of what needs to be done or what needs to be said or what needs to happen at any given time. That is wisdom and wisdom does not come from the accumulation of knowledge.

Anyone who devotes time and attention to what makes people tick, to me, is a smart person.

I think music all the time.

I write poetry to figure things out. Any time I'm trying to wrap my head around something, poetry is like a puzzle-solving strategy for me.

If we had one person who could perfectly read minds we could solve a lot of problems in the world in a very short period of time.

Mistakes and prejudices are as interesting as anything else. They reveal a lot about the mind set and culture of the time under consideration.

The more you spend time with a character, the more you see different nuances of that character.

More time [to decide] without more information just creates anxiety, not insight.

I couldn't see what was real until time had washed away everything else.

Many are the things that man seeing must understand. Not seeing, how shall he know what lies in the hand of time to come?

Comedians dissect jokes all the time. Comedians are beautiful structuralists. But ultimately it's an athletic endeavor.

By tomorrow at this time, I think you're going to have a much better idea of what crazy is. -- Ev Hillman

By the time I get through writing a score, I know the book better than the book writer does, because I've examined every word, and questioned the book writer on every word.