Quotes About Insight

I love convincing a reader that an unusual or seemingly ordinary subject is worth his or her time - it's part of the fun for me as a writer.

It's interesting how you can know someone for a long time, and then one day you just see them in this whole different way.

You don't have to like your family, you don't even have to spend time with them, to know them right down to the bone.

When you're too close to people, when you spend too much time with them and love them too dearly, sometimes you can't see them

We don't always need to be sitting at the foot of the teacher, but from time to time we need someone who can overview us and give us direction.

The idea of intimately entwining with customers [to get ideas] is an idea whose time has come.

Take the time to understand your audience's concerns.

I came late to galleries. A lot of people my age started their careers younger, so I was spared seeing that side for a long time.

Here lay the political genius of Franklin Roosevelt: that in his own time he knew what were the questions that had to be answered, even though he himself did not always find the full answer.

I mainly buy books in my free time.

Wisdom is at all times the least burdensome traveling pack.

It is a good thing to stand away from the canvas from time to time and take a full view of the picture.

Every time an adult is going to write something for a teenager and you don't have, physically, a person who is that, you are always going to be a little off.

Until you have wasted time in a city, you cannot pretend to know it well.

I have a 12-year-old daughter, and all the time people will say, 'Oh, she's young!" and you'd be so surprised what you can learn from that 12-year-old if you just opened up your mind.

I feel like I've always been a full-time historian, but nobody knows it.

Our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination, a kind of everyday clairvoyance, a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to influence how that future will play out.

Ignorance, according to the Buddha, is our basic difficulty. Psychedelics and the process of aging make that clear to me all the time.

Your eye becomes more mature. What you don't see the first time, you keep looking, and eventually you'll see it. And when you are confident with what your eye sees, you know you've got to have it.

I noticed every time I spent a lot of time in the bathtub, I would just get fantastic realizations about myself, and they were so valuable and liberating.

Every day is just a time to learn about yourself and learn about the world and that's how I feel all the time.

Sometimes the closest-held secrets in the world can be pried out by the right question at the right time.

I like being able to just turn the microscope on a small number of people, get to know them, drop into their lives for a period of time.

Re-reading is much underrated. I've read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold once every five years since I was 15. I only started to understand it the third time.