Quotes About Observation

When I hear people flatteringly say, 'You're an expert on East Asia...' I'm certainly an observer of East Asia, and central Asia, and ASEAN, and to a lesser extent South Asia and the Gulf, but there's always something behind the wall in China.

I would love to go to the Last Supper and become a fly on the wall to hear what was said and see what went on.

I'd much rather have sat there and just been a fly on the wall, instead of having to smile at people. I'd rather have been a waitress. Just gone round and stared at people.

I remember kind of doing early acting and thinking, 'God, they don't paint behind the sets.' It's a bit of a shame, really - 'Oh, what's on the other side of this wall? Oh, you can see the plywood.' I was really disappointed. I just thought that these things were real, from watching things as a kid.

When you visit a foreign city you are in it, but not of it, separated by a glass wall. Once, while a student, I was getting dressed in my ground-floor room when a family of Italians crossed the grass to watch, as if I were laid on for their amusement and instruction.

I would be in a room full of people being loud and running around, and I'd be in the corner just playing with the wall. So I was very, very quiet, but when I really got into the arts, that opened me up.

Being honest with you, it's not the 'great' wall of China. It's an all right wall. It's the 'All Right Wall of China.'

Trends suck you in, anywhere in the world, patterns you don't even see. It's so easy. Look at Wall Street - look at any sports team in the world - there are trends. Look at exercising. Nothing but patterns and trends, and that's what I started to see. Like a flock of birds all flying in one direction.

I'm susceptible to that sort of thing - to walls and flowers. You can probably get something more from a wall than a person sometimes. It's just put somewhere.

When we opened our eyes, we saw bedrock exposed in the walls of the crater.

I guess I figured out my dad was a fight coordinator pretty early, because I always saw him running into walls and stuff and nobody got mad at him, but it took me a lot longer to figure out what Mom did, because it was usually stuff on the telephone.

I've always been inspired by small details that make me wander. My mother would ask me, 'What are you looking at so intensely?' I would answer, 'Everything and nothing.' She really supported my wanderings, called me Marco Polo.

I got a Leica film camera and just started wandering the streets. What really touched my heart were those unexpected and unplanned moments of life observed.

I spend a lot of time wandering around the countryside just looking at people, seeing how everything fits together.

I love the 19th-century idea of the flaneur, the poet wandering through the streets.

I don't do a lot of research, exactly, but I'm constantly wandering through the world finding things incredible and remembering them.

I find often I'm wandering around the park with my kids, and I notice something, and I think, 'Oh, I could come up with a clever Facebook post about that.' It's like, 'Wait a minute - that's not what I should be thinking. I should be present in the moment with my kids.'

History repeats itself. So you might wanna pay attention.

What I always wanna tell young people now: Pay attention. This isn't gonna happen again. Rather than try to understand it as it's going along, have it go along for a while and then understand it.

I might be eating something, and the bag opens in a cool way, and I'm like, 'I wanna put that in the song.'

I just wanna write about what I am living as a citizen. That's all.

If you wanna write non-fiction you have to be interested in the world.

The photograph itself doesn't interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality.

From my very first movie, what was my concentration, my inspiration, was I didn't want to narrate something, I didn't want to tell a story. I wanted to show something, I wanted for them to make their own story from what they were seeing.