Quotes About Observation

The cool thing about being a songwriter, or a writer, I guess, in general, you can take on a lot of different things, experience a lot of different things, just by writing about them.

Fundamentally, our job as songwriters is to sit down and listen.

The key to songwriting is just to be able to observe, and put yourself in situations to be around people, and let those ideas come to you.

One of the nice things about songwriting is you can be inspired by absolutely anything.

Sensitivity isn't being wimpy. It's about being so painfully aware that a flea landing on a dog is like a sonic boom. I enjoy a lot of mystery.

Critics have to sit through an awful lot of rubbish, and you feel really sorry for them. In fact, I've been in a play where I felt sorry for the critics.

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.

But remember, I am no politician, and no seer into souls.

As frightening as this may sound, what you see in the books is the way I see the world. And so far I haven't seen anything, either in Florida or elsewhere, to dissuade me from it.

I am usually a pacer. I go to the balcony to check the sight lines way up there, to check the sound system to see how the balance is.

People are so familiar with the show that I think they're perfectly happy to let it go by without asking any questions. There's a passivity to how we experience 'The Sound of Music.'

In my last band, Soundgarden, I had a couple of different drummers sit in on some stuff and it was fun for me to kind of take a break and watch the band.

Now the identification of individual sounds by phonetic observation is an artificial way of proceeding.

For the next week, try the best you can to pay attention to sounds. You will start hearing all these sounds coming in. Once you let them in, you've already done the first and most critical thing, you've honored that information by including it. And by doing that, you've actually changed the world.

There are things done under the name of science which are ridiculous. But there is also stuff done which sounds funny but is really serious.

I used to follow people home. I just like being anonymous so much that I would follow people home because they didn't know who I was, and I could watch them. I know how that sounds. I could not exist but observe.

A journalist enjoys a privileged position. In exchange for not being able to participate in the rough-and-tumble issues of a community, we are given license to observe it all, based on the understanding that we'll tell everyone what happens fairly and squarely. That's harder than it sounds.

I love the idea of documentaries. I love seeing documentaries, and I love making them. Documentaries are incredibly easy to shoot. The ease with which you can hear something's going on, somebody's going to be somewhere: That sounds so interesting. Pick up your camera and go.

Ever notice that Soup for One is eight aisles away from Party Mix?

There's always a source for humor.

Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality.

My work always comes from the same source - from movement. It doesn't necessarily come from an outside idea, though the source can be something small or large that I've seen, often birds or other animals. The seeing can then provoke the imagining.

Coming from the U.K., you realize how quiet England is, and as soon as you get to America, it's really big and brash and loud out here, and South by Southwest was the epitome of that.

The motions of the comets are exceedingly regular, and they observe the same laws as the motions of the planets, but they differ from the motions of vortices in every particular and are often contrary to them.