Quotes About Observation

I usually write away from home, in coffee shops, on trains, on planes, in friends' houses. I like places where there's stuff going on that you can lift your eyes, see something interesting, overhear a conversation.

Taking trains and trams in Berlin, I noticed people reading. Books, I mean - not pocket-size devices that bleep as if censorious, on which even Shakespeare scans like a spreadsheet.

Music is the reason I started talking to people. When I started singing in bars and trains, I began to learn the behaviour of people. Music was the bait that helped me get something from them and give myself to them.

I was an observer. I liked to listen rather than openly express myself. This trait is something that I've retained over the years.

I think I was just born like that, a personality trait. I'm an observer.

I am an emotional and fragile person. I observe life, I am perceptive and can read a person's body language. I have a strong journalistic streak in me, and had I not been a filmmaker, I would have become a film journalist. I have combined my perceptive and journalistic traits to create my own brand of cinema.

Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the reality.

When I go to Brazil, I feel like an American, and in the U.S., I always notice the traits that make me Brazilian.

All these movies are observational comedies. I see somebody, maybe a dry cleaner, and notice how they are. Maybe I'll decide to turn a person with those traits into a studio chief.

David Beckham is always seen as the thickest man on the planet, too daft to complete a jigsaw puzzle. But then you watch old footage of him playing and every time he plays a ball across the field, he's intuitively working out the trajectory of the ball.

When scouts evaluate players for power, they are not simply watching to see if the ball clears the wall. They're laser focused on the flight of the ball, its trajectory and the speed with which it leaves the bat.

You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.

In our judgment of human transactions, the law of optics is reversed; we see the most indistinctly the objects which are close around us.

Now I'm writing about contemporary Los Angeles from memory. My process was to hang out, observe, research what I was writing about, and almost immediately go back to my office and write those sections. So it was a very close transfer between observation and writing.

I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity.

I examine other people's characteristics, so when I'm playing characters, I don't always have to make them me; I can transform into others.

As a child, I would watch my mom get ready for work and just sit there for hours watching her transform. However, it wasn't until much later on that I really started to dabble in makeup myself.

If you're passionate about the world, and if you really look closely at everything around you, each thing can be transformed into a shoe, or into a part of a shoe.

I think my life has been transformed by the ability to take things that exist in the world and look at them more closely. I think that's what art does at its best: it allows us to slow down.

In 1999, my team discovered that the star Upsilon Andromedae was circled by three gas-giant planets - the first distant multiplanet system ever found. That same year, other researchers observed the first 'transit' of an exoplanet - a planet blocking out a small fraction of the starlight as it passes in front of the star.

I was there when Gordon Brown basically was taking over - so right in the middle of that transition. It was fantastic; I learnt a lot.

Space enables a higher degree of transparency, it's hard to hide from space-based assets.

I have often endeavoured to view the circulation of the blood in terrestrial animals, but without success, by reason that no parts of their bodies were sufficiently transparent.

I know most players do, but I always keep both eyes opened. I still do it. I see two shafts, the real one and the transparent one. I look for what's on the inside edge of the transparent one.