Quotes About Observation

Being anonymous is a great luxury. It's a big loss to lose that. Mostly, the loss is the ability to observe others without being observed yourself. And as an actor, that is your key tool.

Being a good observer is a great tool to have as a writer, just taking the world in.

As a writer, it's a great narrative tool to have that character who is slightly detached but at the same time observant of his reality, because I think that's pretty much what being a writer is - being there, watching and internalizing.

I try to see everything I do. It's a good learning tool for me. You kind of remember what you were going for when you were shooting it, and then see how it comes across in the context of what comes before and after it.

You can't be a reporter using Google. It can be a tool. But you have to get out of the house.

In theater, the primary tool for me was voice. On-screen, it's the eyes.

I know my first years sitting on the bench, largely behind Rickey Green, was a great learning tool for me.

In acting, the basic tool is observation. Whenever you see something, you store it in your head, and when you come across a character that reminds you of that instance, you incorporate it.

Songwriting has always been a means to an end for me. That end being a tool to try to understand myself in the world and, through observation, make sense of the world.

If you're going to create a character, the tools you use to make that character 'real' are the lives you see around you. The people you listen to on the street. The emotions you see on faces and bodies while you're sitting... in a Starbucks, watching the world go by.

The big artist keeps an eye on nature and steals her tools.

Being in a first-world country, it's like we have a first-row seat to witnessing humanity, but we're not really witnessing anything. Despite all the new technological tools we've been given, we're still powerless, watching everything happen like it's a theatrical performance.

Your primary tools, as an actor, are observation and imagination. You can pretty much get everything you need from that, and you do. It brings back that element of pretend.

One of the first things I do when I step onto a set is I scan the set and try to take in every detail, because what I'm trying to find are tools that I can use to incorporate myself into the space and tools that I can use to make the performance authentic and to build on the authenticity of that.

Webster and I are very aloof. The two of us go and sit there by ourselves. I sit by myself in the corner with my book and the newspaper. He kind of runs around a little bit, and then he goes and sits on top of the picnic table. He never plays with other little dogs.

Cats and dogs believe politicians are like cemetery caregivers; they are on top of everyone, but nobody listens.

Cartoonists create so many cartoons on any given topic that we can follow the life cycle of a comic idea and how it evolves over time more quickly than we can with a form like the novel.

The topic 'Farm Wisdom' is not a gospel doctrine or scriptural topic, although I found considerable scriptural support for the lessons learned on the farm.

You don't go to the library and walk along and pick out a topic. You are riding the bus, or shopping at Safeway, and all of a sudden the idea comes to you.

The topics just kind of come to me. If they are relevant, it's because they're happening in the world around me, and it's affecting me. Poetry is my way of dealing with it.

Sometimes I think that our laboratories are but little earthworks which men build about themselves, and whose puny tops too often conceal from view the Olympian heights; that we who work in these laboratories are but skilled artisans compared with the man who is able to observe and to draw accurate deductions from the world about him.

The Tories have been offering us a cocktail of incompetence and malice and Labour haven't done anything to draw attention to it. It's been like watching Mesut Ozil drop perfect crosses on to the head of an increasingly frustrated Stephen Hawking.

Every second is mapped out and he has this total childish fascination with color and shapes and sequences.

Everyone has a smart phone, and everything is recorded. One event spills into another. Conclusions come quickly at the near total expense of consideration of what just actually happened.