Quotes About Observation

Da sind nur eine Sonne, Baume, Blumen, Wasser und Liebe. Freilich, fehlt Letztere im Herzen des Beschauers, mag das Ganze wohl einen schlechten Anblick gewähren, und die Sonne hat dann bloß soundso viel Meilen im Durchmesser, und die Bäume sind gut zum Einheizen, und die Blumen werden nach den Staubfäden klassifiziert, und das Wasser ist nass.

But fiction is not, as many nonwriters seem to think, a random grab bag of made-up whimsies, as undisciplined and unreasoned as a dream. Nor is it simply reporting with the names changed. It is an amalgam of experience, education, reading, insight, analysis, conversations, observation, and conscious research.

I began to think I quite liked her really. It's always so nice to meet someone more badly behaved than oneself.

Bad enough when a man wanted to touch but could only look. Worse yet when he'd touched and not even noticed.

One of the first things that helped me to understand certain things about writing was seeing 'The Iceman Cometh' in the Village when I was a kid, before I ever became a newspaperman, and realizing that the world I knew could also be the subject of some amazing stuff.

The places where I have the nameless character in 'My Name Is Legion' meet his boss are real places I've been to. That works well for tax purposes, writing into my stories the places I've actually visited.

I was always the observer, trying to understand what was going on. I was always the new kid. Writing became my safe place.

Medicine may be the lens through which I see the world, but since I think of medicine as 'life +', a place where life is exaggerated and seen at its most vital and poignant, I'll be writing about life more than I will be writing about medicine.

I grew up on film sets but more around the process of making films. I saw a lot of the editing process and the writing process, which takes years. That really affected me growing up, that side of it.

The writing process for us is different with every song. Sometimes they come from our lives, or someone else we know may be going through something that we choose to write about.

Everything I've written is based on something that has happened to me or something that I know a great deal about.

I'm always looking, as an actor, for activities. I think it's far more interesting to watch what people do than what they say. You always want to watch behavior, because the dialogue as written by our illustrious leaders is great. Eminently playable.

'Sunday Morning Coming Down' is probably the most directly autobiographical thing I'd written. In those days, I was living in a slum tenement that was torn down afterwards, but it was $25 a month in a condemned building, and 'Sunday Morning Coming Down' was more or less looking around me and writing about what I was doing.

Most of the songs I've written have painted a picture on how I have evolved, what I see in people, what inspires me.

Sometimes the best way to learn something is by doing it wrong and looking at what you did.

Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong, but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching, you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence.

Whenever I go on a ride, I'm always thinking of what's wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

There's nothing wrong with being shallow as long as you're insightful about it.

I'm a good teacher and am great at observation and picking out what's wrong and fixing it.

Something is wrong with America. I wonder sometimes what people are thinking about or if they're thinking at all.

Galileo wasn't put in prison because he was wrong about anything he discovered looking through his telescope; rather, he was incarcerated simply because he saw what others didn't wish to see.

I don't like to watch my work after I do it because it just - I'll always look at the wrong things.

Whenever you play against Fred - we certainly did it - you let him get it because he has to take three or four touches. He doesn't know how to do one or two touches. Anyone that watches his game, he gets it facing the wrong way, turns, turns, chops, chops and he'll give you the ball three or four times a game.