Quotes About Observation

I have a beautiful sofa, which is my writing corner, on which I sit every day and look outside the window.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

I listened to this interview once with Jerry Seinfeld that really influenced my comedy and all of my writing, which is that when you're starting out in comedy, it's the audience that tells you what's funny about you. And you need to listen to that and make a note of that.

My new house has a deck that wraps around my writing room; my writing room has many windows, and outside the windows I've hung bird feeders... for enticing different species. So I imagine I will be writing about that.

The greatest compliment I get about my writing is when people say, 'How did you know so much about me?' And of course, the answer is very simple: 'I just observed myself without sentimentality.'

I get the ideas from everything. Children sometimes think you have to have special experiences to write, but good writing brings out what's special in ordinary things.

The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down.

She found her regard for Mr. Winter turning to something like suspicion—though notice how often we lower suspicion upon others to avoid putting ourselves under scrutiny. Now

How truly novel. The emotional life of furniture. I never.

The thing about a mirror is this: The one who stares into it is condemned to consider the world from her own perspective. Even a bowed mirror works primarily by engaging the eyes, and she who centers herself in its surface is unlikely to notice anyone in the background who lacks a certain status, distinction.

The overdressed traveller betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing, while the true traveller knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory.

The master is bringing Darwin through to examine lower life-forms, Rhoda. Straighten your spine or you'll be mistook for a mollusk.

Stinging words! You re critical of everyone," observes Iris. "Oh, not everyone," says Clara in an offhand manner. "Only everybody who's alive as well as most people who are dead. I feel quite neutral about anybody not yet born.

How like a spoon with a razor edge is human edge.

You two are just up the stairs. Next to my room, so I can keep an eye on you should you get up to anything. What's your name so I can call it out during wild sex?

Humans are so blind, their eyes on the ground, themselves always at the center. Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything. The end of the map. We only live where someone's horizon sweeps someone else's. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much.

Galinda, who didn't know much about Poetry, thought perhaps this was the accepted way of appreciating it. She grumbled a little to Shenshen, who sat in a straightback chair to one side, looking dropsical. Wax from the taper was about to drip onto Sheenshen's silk-shouldered white gown with the lemon-chiffon swags, and ruin it, most likely, but Galinda decided Shenshen's family could afford to replace a gown. She kept still.

There was something vulgar about traveling in jewels. As she realized this truth, she codified it into a saying. At the earliest perfect opportunity she would bring it out as proof of her having opinions—and of having traveled. "The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing," she murmured, trying it out, "while the true traveler knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory." Good, very good.

The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing.

At her feet was a largish basket woven of twigs. He didn't look into it; he couldn't. Every now and then her shoeless foot would nip out from beneath the dark hem of her skirt and give the basket a little push, and because of its rounded bottom, the basket rocked for a time. Then the green foot would appear again, and start the rocking over.

The more we notice, the more we can enjoy.

As Michel de Montaigne observed, The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced. p 233

I've learned to put great store in my own observations of everyday life, because while laboratory experiments are one way to study human nature, they aren't the only way.

When I think of myself in the third person, many things become clearer.