Quotes About Observation

I think just having everybody know who you are is more of a challenge. More than anything about it is just knowing people are watching. I know who I am, so it's watching things I say, what I do. Even if I'm in line at one of the rest stops or something, it's just being on my Ps and Qs at all times more than anything.

To be a good artist, you need to be sensitive to the world around you, you need to be curious, you need to listen, you need to be willing to learn from people. A lot of great art is about people being moved by something or seeing something that stops them dead.

I've still got my characters in my head, and I can still hear them. When I go to the grocery store, I hear them.

I have a magpie mind, by which I mean I see and hear little things - photos, fragments of conversation - and store them away for future use.

I think by my father owning a store, I was definitely aware of the commercial aspect of selling clothes. His shop was a place I enjoyed spending time in as a boy, so I learned things almost by osmosis at times, by literally just being around all the action and not really despite myself.

Ideas come from life: what happens in mine, what I see happening in others', mixed with a great deal of imagination. I might see a person in a grocery store and build a whole character and life out of what's in her basket.

I never write something and consciously embed political commentary or any other kind of commentary. I just try to get the characters into a room or out of a room, or onto the plane, or through the grocery store. The political stuff, the class stuff, the gender stuff, is in the air, it's in their interactions, because it's there for all of us.

When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums.

If I was a criminal, stationery stores and bakeries would be the two kinds of places I would concentrate on.

If you think you know the consumer better than anyone, then you're in real trouble. So we take a close watch. You spend time in stores.

I was drawn to street photography because there are pictures everywhere there: a woman holding a dog, a baby screaming to be put in a pram, kids playing punch ball, stores with huge barrels of kosher pickles outside. I wanted to photograph life, and here it was.

I really like looking at what's new in my favourite designers' stores, even if I don't buy anything.

I've spent many hours of my life browsing in stores. At 21, I admired clothes I couldn't afford. At 30, I bought them. At 40, I sometimes go simply for the pleasure, of seeing what is new, of learning what counts as beautiful now.

I used to say that stores were like museums. I appreciated it, I could look at it, but it really wasn't for me and I couldn't have it.

I always saw the best reporters as ones you hardly ever saw other than when they were back in the newsroom, writing their stories.

Human behavior in the midst of hardship caught my attention very early on, and my first stories were all pictures, no words.

No formal course in fiction-writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.

Writers are magpies by nature, always collecting shiny things, storing them away and looking for connections of things.

The kind of neuroscience that I do and my colleagues do is almost like the weatherman. We are always chasing storms. We want to see and measure storms - brainstorms, that is.

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

I'm a sarcastic, observational storyteller.

I think I'm a born storyteller. Inspiration is all around me. I can read a newspaper article and come up with an idea for a book.

Painters were also attorneys, happy storytellers of anecdote, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists, engineers, but there were no creative painters.

There are two different forms of storytelling: Novels tend to come from the inside of a character, and movies tend to look at them from the outside in relation to others in their world.