Quotes About Perception

I am in so many movies that are on TV at 2:00 a.m. that people think I am dead.

Michael," he said, with that wolfish Nicholson grin, "it has been proved that people who are left-handed die earlier than smokers. I am right-handed, so I am ahead of the game.

I was cast as a drunkard, and at my first rehearsal I came staggering onto the stage, then swayed about a bit. The director held up his hand. "Stop. What are you doing, Michael?" "I'm drunk in this scene," I explained, failing to hide my irritation that it had not been apparent.

I know that," he said. "But what are you doing? You're giving me an actor playing a drunk. I'm paying you to be a drunk. You're trying to talk slurred and walk crooked. A real drunk is trying to speak clearly and walk straight." My wise and wily repertory theatre director had summed up movie acting in one line, and I remember it and use it to this day. My

She hadn't really known Box; it turned out perhaps she hadn't really known Vivian, either. Maybe nobody really knew anybody.

She'd spent enough time trying to read the tea leaves of his heart.

It used to be that people had character; now houses have character and people have personality. That

There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.

Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon.

It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.

Nothing is boring exept to people who aren't really paying attention.

Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big dark eyeglasses!

Sometimes I lie awake and hear noises in the house, and despite myself I'm frightened. Then I hear some familiar sound—a clock strikes, or a train whistles somewhere—and my fear abates. But why should those sounds comfort me, and others frighten me? Why couldn't a ghost make the sound of a train?

Ask anyone what that means, what it means to see a miracle, and they will say that it's something impossible, but they mean that a miracle is something formerly believed to be impossible that turns out not to be, not to be impossible, in other words, but possible after all. If this were really true, then miracles would be the most ordinary things in the world, the most uninspiring things in the world, and what can one expect from people who have never been anything but ordinary and uninspired.

Although unavailable for analysis the moment it happens, being struck a violent blow on the head is a very interesting experience.

I could say she looks like da Vinci's "Lady with Ermine" if there had ever been such a thing.

With great profundity I note the pleasure one gets or takes in pushing wheeled objects, as opposed to the depression involved in pulling them.

The person that's always talkin', you don't have to worry about that person. The person that while you're in his face, he's just lookin' at you with a smile on his face, that's the guy you worry about.

What is important is not what you hear said, it's what you observe.

It's lucky no one else knows what our most secret thoughts are. We'd all be seen for the cunning, self-aggrandizing fools we are.

How long was a year anyway? Fifty-two weeks? Three hundred and sixty-five days? Eight thousand seven hundred and sixty hours?

Neil freshened our coffee and passed her the platter of picked-over pastries, offering, "Have some." She noticed, as I knew she would, that the bagels were untouched. She asked everyone, "What's the matter? You don't like Jew food?" I would normally bristle at such a comment, but as Barb herself was Jewish, she could say such things with impunity—and often did.

He hated confronting those lost moments, being presented with some detail from his past and having to look on it like a stranger. It made his life feel like a made-up thing. A net full of holes.

He was struck by the sensation she'd made it happen in some way, that his life was simply a story the old woman was making up in her head.