Quotes About Observation

As for Amitabh Bachchan, I worked with him in 'Reshma Aur Shera' where he played a mute character. While shooting I noticed that he expresses a lot through his eyes. Around the same time he did a commentary for 'Bhuvan Shome.' I felt this boy was amazing. He has got both the traits required for being a good actor: voice and expression.

I learned a lot in my life by paying attention and listening to how people around me worked.

All the kids - well, I don't know about the girls in the family, but all the boys - worked in my grandfather's office in the summers and maybe on weekends once in a while, so they saw how he operated. They saw how he treated people. They saw the kinds of people he rubbed elbows with.

My dad's a scratch golfer and I've got the knack of seeing something and then replicating it. I saw my dad swing a club and I worked out how to do the same thing. My backswing and follow-through have been basically the same since I was two.

To me, the newspaper business was a way to learn about life and how things worked in the real world and how people spoke. You learn all the skills - you learn to listen, you learn to take notes - everything you use later as a novelist was valuable training in the newspaper world. But I always wanted to write novels.

With the hugely talented women I've worked with or observed, it's not a question about temperament or ego; it's a question about getting it right. If they've got a reputation for being difficult it's usually because they just don't suffer fools.

Still, it can be more effective to accomplish what you need to accomplish with the minimum effort. Watch Anthony Hopkins. He doesn't appear to be doing anything. He is so still that you can't see him working, but you are drawn into his character through his very stillness.

I don't watch anything of mine much. I haven't gone to drama school, or college, either. I just like to watch other actors in action. I learned so much from working with De Niro. I'd be in a scene with him where I was supposed to be acting, and I was just watching.

That's what sets apart one actor from another, and that you can't teach. You can't give someone that. When you're working, putting a character together, or in a scene, that's where things will happen that you have to have the intuition to notice them, and to register them.

It's like, sometimes I'll watch a movie, and it's got some big star in it playing a working-class person, and the character is in a grocery store, and you can kind of tell, from just watching the scene, that this actor doesn't do their own shopping. So you have to have some sense of reality.

By the way, if you ever watch Prince Harry on a panel or giving a talk, you can tell that as royals go, he's comparatively normal, and I think that's largely because he had a workplace experience with people with radically different social backgrounds.

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

I'm very inquisitive, and I always have questions and need to touch things to see how it works or why it works.

To work in architecture you are so much involved with society, with politics, with bureaucrats. It's a very complicated process to do large projects. You start to see the society, how it functions, how it works. Then you have a lot of criticism about how it works.

The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.

Everything for me is visual. That's just how my head works.

You gotta follow the white guys. Truly. They've got this thing wired. Too often, we live within their games, so why would you not study what works? Take away the bad stuff - because there's a lot - and use the savvy interesting stuff and figure out how they can apply. It's a good one for the ladies.

People think that what I see diving must drive what I put into films, but that isn't really the case. When I am making a Hollywood production, I am telling a different kind of story. Of course, if I see something interesting that works, we will look at it, but they are different things.

Life is the biggest workshop: you have to observe life. You have to be one with the milieu more than anything else.

I believe that sitting in a street and hearing the people talk, argue, console each other is one workshop every actor must attend on a regular basis.

I have always observed that to succeed in the world one should seem a fool, but be wise.

There are three kinds of people in this world: people who make it happen, people who watch what happens, and people who wonder what happened.

The eye of a human being is a microscope, which makes the world seem bigger than it really is.

The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.