Quotes About Observation

I struggle to watch myself in any scene, to be honest. What's done is done. I wish I was able to watch myself, as it would really help me develop as an actor. But I'm not brave enough. It's a difficult thing to do - looking at yourself as this utterly different person on a screen.

Imagine how asleep or utterly unperceptive and clueless you would have to be not to see yourself as absurd for the most part.

I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, and then I can pick up on something where you suddenly see that it's not.

I think all our leaders are utterly beneath us. You just watch 'Prime Minister's Questions' and go: 'How is this the best that we've got?'

I was so intrigued by insects and things that crawled or flew - I could spend hours by myself in a vacant lot.

Comedians are never really on vacation because you're always at attention... that antenna is always out there.

When you go on vacation with people, you learn a lot about them.

Well, you know, writers just suck up new experiences - we're just like the vacuum cleaners of newness.

When people are uncomfortable - and many people are when they have to negotiate - they start rambling as a way to fill the vacuum of silence. Some of the strongest negotiators I know just sit back and listen. The less they engage, the more likely the other person is to slip up and offer information they otherwise would have kept guarded.

It is interesting to see what other designers do, and not work in a vacuum.

Designers don't live in a vacuum; they are not blind to what's going on. They, too, will be inspired by what they see, and that will come out in their work.

We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which is wont to be simple and always consonant to itself.

The artist is an interpreter of Nature. People learn to love Nature through pictures. To the artist, nothing is in vain; nothing beneath his notice. If he is great enough, he will exalt every subject which he treats.

Even in the very beginning when she would bump into George Valentine and people would start taking pictures of her, she never thought, 'I'm with George Valentine. I need to get a picture with him.' She's like 'oh that's funny. Everyone's taking pictures!'

That young people don't have valid thoughts about the world because they haven't been alive long enough is sadly a very popular and, frankly, unoriginal sentiment. When I think about that time, I was just responding to the world around me.

The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.

Observe, orient, decide, act. It's fighter pilot terminology. If you have the faster OODA loop in a dogfight, you live. The other person dies. In Silicon Valley, the OODA loop of your decision-making is effectively what differentiates your ability to succeed.

If you look across the valley, you can see exactly what I mean: about four beautiful houses, and you think something is happening in each of them. It's like a mural.

Mounting a large rock, I was able to see a considerable body of the enemy moving by the flank in rear of their line engaged, and passing from the direction of the foot of Great Round Top through the valley toward the front of my left.

I'm often stunned when I come up over Mulholland, and I'm looking down at the Valley, and I can see for thirty miles; I can see the mountains, or all the way to the ocean.

I used to write in a room overlooking the valley from where I could see too much, whether checking the sheep and alpacas or seeing the trout rise on the lake.

For me at age 11, I had a pair of binoculars and looked up to the moon, and the moon wasn't just bigger, it was better. There were mountains and valleys and craters and shadows. And it came alive.

An artist looks at a juice bottle, an egg carton, or a newspaper and sees something valuable in them.

We can get carried away with our heads in books, and although there's so much to be learned from that, I think sitting in a cafe and speaking with someone - whatever it is, their mannerisms, their choices, are just as valuable as any class you can go to.