Quotes About Observation

When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so.

I spend most flights staring out into that endless cloudscape and watching the planet drift by below. I never understand people who close the window shade. There's magic out there.

If you live in the city, you only have to look out your window to see enough that would make you feel that you don't want to step outside your front door ever again.

In any case, whenever technical progress opened a new window into the surrounding world, I felt the urge to look through this window, hoping to see something unexpected.

You see, I don't draw from life at all, but I do look out of my window a lot.

The detached observer's view is one window on the world.

Every time I copy something, I can draw it for the rest of my life. But research is so painful - I mean just opening up a magazine looking for a picture of a car or looking out the window looking for a car is just hard!

There was a village watercolour society and they'd come and paint in my field. I watched them from the window, the way they would struggle this way and that to find the perfect moment. God has made every angle on that beautiful, and I felt that tremendously.

Being a good songwriter means paying attention and sticking your hand out the window to catch the song on the way to someone else's house!

The view of the local scene through the eyes of a native participant in that scene is a different window.

I became startled by the extraordinary difference between something whose surface is completely invisible which only makes itself present by virtue of what it reflects, and a window, which doesn't make itself apparent at all, in the ideal case.

The most interesting thing was looking out the window and taking photographs of different places on Earth.

Sometimes you need to stand with your nose to the window and have a good look at jazz. And I've done that on many occasions.

When I still lived in Manhattan, people-watching was my hobby, and I spent many Sunday afternoons eating up the scene from a window seat at a Starbucks on Broadway.

The thing people don't understand is that touring or travelling or whatever you do in my position means you go to all these cool places all over the world, but you see everything from a car window. You don't get to see much of the city or meet people at all.

Every single day the world seems like it is on the brink of falling apart. But then I look outside my window, and things look about the same as they did a week ago. It's almost a form of cognitive dissonance.

I got live tweeted once by someone who was opposite my home in some rented accommodation. He was actually describing on twitter what I was doing. 'I took a shirt off, I went to the window, I put a shirt back on... ' And I've got blinds in my flat!

I have a room dedicated to music and recording. I go there first thing in the morning and just before I go to bed. And it has a window to my street, so I can watch all the crazies walking by.

I can write most places. I particularly like writing on trains. Being between places is quite liberating, and looking out of the window, watching a procession of landscapes and random-ish objects, is very good for stories.

I don't write for theme, but if you work closely on some guy fixing a sandwich or a window or a table or trying to visit an old teacher or walking down the street on which he was a boy, a theme, a human hope, will emerge.

When looking out the window and watching the water becomes a drama, then literally everything is a drama.

The curse of being a songwriter is that's you're always at work. I could look out the window right now and see something that would make me want to write.

When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It's better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers.

In terms of so-called fly-on-the-wall documentaries, there's a claim that the camera is a transparent window into a pre-existing reality. What really is happening is that the film crew and the subjects are collaborating to simulate a reality in which they pretend the camera is not present.