Quotes About Observation

Generally speaking, if people are prepared to stick their heads above the power pit, like Zinn says, and absorb what's going on around them, it makes them think.

And I have to say, for the record, my favorite line from 'Without A Clue' is after Michael Caine pokes a dead body with a stick and announces to everyone, 'It is my opinion that this man is dead.'

My dad told me something long before I was in politics, and when your dad gives you advice every single day, eventually one or two of the things stick in your mind. And he said, don't believe what people say, believe what they do.

The really good stand up comedians can be angry but relatable, and they have interestingly humanizing personalities. Their observational skills are far greater than mine, so I'll just stick to reading lines off a page.

The fundamental essence of science, which I think we've lost in our education system, is poking something with a stick and seeing what happens. Embrace that process of inquiry.

The fact is that I find more most men are more open, more generous, and much more stimulating than the majority of females I know.

All the things worth writing about are outside me. I'm a lens, not a source. And even if it's not always a comfortable journey, it's always a stimulating one.

I choose my actors well and get to know the quirks of their personalities - and, most of all, I share humor with them. Then I keep my eyes open when they rehearse and perform, because you never know where the next stimulation comes from.

You look for the way something is built. You see a Prada bag and you look at the stitching at the back. If it's a fake one, then they make it really cheap. If it's a real Prada bag and I will look at it, I will count every single stitch and make sure they are exact distance apart.

I've always gone to see all kinds of shows and stole what I could, as we all do. We see an artist and hear a song and think, 'I bet I could sing that song. I'll put that in my show.'

For 'The Gift of Stones,' I spent an afternoon chasing a flock of Canadian geese.

I sat through Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones like three times at the Skyway when it came out.

It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn't understand, you'd have some obligation to guess. Now you don't.

In the local state school I attended in England, I saw and heard far more awareness of where a person stood in the social hierarchy than I had ever heard stateside.

Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.

I love the South Bank: every era of architecture is there, and you can stop, look, and listen.

The key is in remaining just aloof enough from a painting so that you know when to stop.

Anyone who has ever stopped to watch a hawk in flight will know that this is one of the natural world's most elegant phenomena.

When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn't know enough about things. They haven't been around enough - novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things - books like 'How To Run a Company' - I stopped reading novels.

I hadn't stopped fearing the chance of passing on an illness, but that fear had become balanced by the observation that being ill wasn't the same as being beaten.

Trump could teach Republicans in Washington a lot if only they stopped posturing long enough to watch carefully.

Sometimes an opponent stops breathing, and you realise something drastic has happened and they are trying not to let on. Or they go quiet, or they get fidgety. After a while you pick these things up and become more alert to them.

And it's true, you hear things in Damascus and, after a few hours, the human double-take stops operating.

The fact that this radiation is so penetrating - nothing stops it - makes it so you can look for things that you have never seen before, and you can look at things you know in a way that's new. That is really the big step forward.