Quotes About Observation

I laughed at Willie Nelson, wondering why he spends all his life on that tour bus. And I look at myself, and I'm sitting in airplanes half the time.

If I'm feeling desperate, I'll go out image-hunting. I'll go to news agents and stand at the rack flicking through magazines or go to second-hand bookshops. And then, bit by bit, like concrete poetry, I start to realise that I am drawn to particular things, and then I start wondering why that is.

Sometimes I'll watch teenagers and find myself not quite believing I'm older than they are - even wondering, delusionally, if they can see any difference between us.

Writing is the thing that pervades my whole day - I'm always wondering how I might describe something or improve my understanding. I'm constantly trying to remember an eavesdropped conversation or an idea for a story.

The few wonders of the world only exist while there are those with the sight to see them.

One character mistook me for the model and remarked 'That Man-Tan sure works wonders!' That ain't Man-Tan. I'm tan, man. From my head to my toes.

In the span of my own lifetime I observed such wondrous progress in plant evolution that I look forward optimistically to a healthy, happy world as soon as its children are taught the principles of simple and rational living.

There is a woman named Wendy Wood, who did a study when she was at Duke, and she followed around college students to try to figure out how much of their day was decision-making versus how much was habit. And what she found was that about 45 percent of all the behaviors that someone did in a day was habit.

I really don't think there is anybody in the business with better eyes than Elijah Wood.

Originally I wanted somewhere to set my short stories about the sort of people I recognise having grown up with. Carnbeg was staring me in the face all the time, only I had somehow failed to see that. Not seeing the wood for the trees, I suppose.

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.

You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.

True Scouts are the best friends of animals, for from living in the woods and wilds, and practising observation and tracking, they get to know more than other people about the ways and habits of birds and animals, and therefore they understand them and are more in sympathy with them.

I look at trees, hunt mushrooms, and watch animals. Fishing is what gets me out into the woods so I can notice these things.

After more than 40 years of living in the British countryside, any day I see a badger is precious. I knew the location of every sett in the woods around my childhood home, but rarely saw them with my own eyes.

We used to go in the woods by ourselves, and you can't help noticing the world then, especially animals. People used to know a lot about the natural world, especially in the country.

I love the outdoors and looking at snakes, squirrels, bugs - just going through the woods and being part of it. You can smell the different trees. And I listen. There's so much you can learn by listening, by sitting and watching things happen.

Look at 'Marienbad' honestly. What is it? It is just another talking radio show with pictures. Nobody acts. People stand around while the author talks about the woodwork.

I used to dress up and impersonate our next-door neighbor, Miss Cox. She wore rubber boots, a wool hat, and her nose always dripped.

Sure, women sportswriters look when they're in the clubhouse. Read their stories. How else do you explain a capital letter in the middle of a word?

The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.

Your internal dialogue has got to be different from what you say. And, you know, in film, hopefully that registers and speaks volumes. It's always the unspoken word and what's happening behind someone's eyes that makes it so rich.

For one who has an interest in the body as text, airports are treasure troves of information. It seems almost un-American to enjoy delays, and perhaps enjoy is not the best word, but certainly a delayed flight, if it does nothing else, allows one the opportunity to make prolonged observations about one's fellow travelers.

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is 'naive' spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of 'bonsai.'