Quotes About Observation

Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.

I've been collecting linguistic oddities for years and years, ever since I was small. I've got loads of notebooks where I've jotted down things I couldn't make sense of.

Cricket makes no sense to me. I find it beautiful to watch and I like that they break for tea. That is very cool, but I don't understand. My friends from The Clash tried to explain it years and years ago, but I didn't understand what they were talking about.

I used to take pride if my kids were playing basketball, and I'd be there, and I wouldn't say anything. People were obviously expecting me to yell and scream at the ref and at them and everything. I wouldn't say anything.

If you're going to scream and yell and pull a groin when calling a catch, you have to really make sure what you're seeing is actually what's happening.

Try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, 'Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow,' and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives you your own impression of the scene before you.

I said, 'Ooh, Dad, I want the yellow ones.' He said, 'Where?' I said, 'Right there, Dad. I want the yellow ones.' Everybody goes, 'Those are green'. That's how I knew I was colorblind.

Be like Curious George, start with a question and look under the yellow hat to find what's there.

Drive through a yellow light, and you may be ticketed thanks to a camera tied onto a pole. Everybody's watching everything. And then sending it out to the world via email.

I remember looking at James Joyce's journals. It was just amazing - it looked like ants had written on the page. So much writing on one page, every corner of the page was filled. Some of the lines were underlined in yellow or blue or red. A lot of color, intense writing.

Once I graduated college, I did a couple of different sort of unique internship positions, if you will. I spent three months in my mother's office, who was then the CEO of our company, and I really got to just sit in every meeting that she had, and I would write down questions on a yellow legal pad.

I wasn't a spy. I'd have been spotted in five seconds. Yes, I was in intelligence, but that covered a multitude of things.

Being a doctor has taught me a lot about directing. You're doing the same thing: You're reconstructing the manifold of behavior to the point where an audience says, yes, that's exactly like people I know.

It's so important as a creative person to go out and look for things. Go to galleries, talk to people, read books. Yes, you can just type something into Google, but if you read and interact, you'll have a deeper understanding of the world.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

I had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker - yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action. I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday.

Anyone who is interested in the psychology of children will have observed that whereas one child will resist temptation or seduction, another will easily yield to it. There are children who will hardly oppose any resistance to the invitation of an unknown person to follow him; others who react in an opposite way in the same circumstances.

Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.

I wanted to share the experience of how yoga and meditation have transformed my life, how they have enabled me to observe who I am, first in my body, and then emotionally, and on to a kind of spiritual path.

If I am out partying, I end up watching the people doing yoga on my way home.

Nature is impersonal, awe-inspiring, elegant, eternal. It's geometrically perfect. It's tiny and gigantic. You can travel far to be in a beautiful natural setting, or you can observe it in your backyard - or, in my case, in the trees lining New York City sidewalks, or in the clouds above skyscrapers.

When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.

From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline.

When you're on the subway in New York, people literally could be 11-inches away from you, and you can't just stare at them.