Quotes About Observation

I think the big lesson I've learned is that it's very hard to write satire in America because almost immediately, whatever you've thought of turns out to come true, or sometimes it already was true.

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It's a story.

Tina Fey is a genius - I've seen it with my own eyes now. She's a very observant person, and I've never seen somebody write such a high volume or as quickly as she does.

I really think more fledgling novelists - and many current and even established novelists - should get out into the real world and cover local politics, sports, culture, and crime and write it up on deadline.

Whenever I write, I write what I find to be the way people are. I never use any symbolism at all, but if you write as true to life as you possibly can, people will see symbolism. They'll all see different symbolism, but they're apt to because you can see it in life.

When you are interviewing someone, don't just write down what he says. Ask yourself: Does this guy remind you of someone? What does the room feel like? Notice smells, voice inflection, neighborhoods you pass through. Be a cinematographer.

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

Being an outsider makes you a really good writer.

What description of clouds and sunsets was to the old novelist, description of scientific apparatus and methods is to the modern Scientific Detective writer.

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

I think, as a writer, you see the big picture, and as an actor, you're thinking of all the minutiae, all the very small details.

When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you.

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

The highest compliment one can give a writer is not to say that one wholeheartedly agrees with his observations, but that he provoked - really, forced - difficult thinking about consequential matters and internal questioning of one's own assumptions, often without quick or clear resolution.

Sometimes there's something that a writer doesn't see or a producer doesn't see when he's looking at a shot.

If you're a writer, you know that the stories don't come to you - you have to go looking for them. The old men in the lobby: that's where the stories were.

Doing interesting things and then writing about them is the best way to become a good writer.

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.

That's kind of my job in the writer's room. I'm always the guy going, like, 'People wouldn't say that there. They wouldn't say that.' Like, I hate when I watch sitcoms and something crazy happens, and people just kind of go, 'Huh?' and then they just go on.

I mean, truly, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, and if you can't spot that CM Punk is magic from the moment he walks in the door, then you're reading a playbook from an antiquated writer.

I try to think of it not as writer's block, but a time where you just need to live life and experience things so you have something to write about.

If you are a good writer - and I think I am - you are able to handle any kind of group and imagine their lives.

I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It's not the way I work.