Be a calm beholder of what is happening around you.
My natural state is an outsider. I've always felt outside the group, and I've always been analyzing the group.
I was never a wet-eyed, passionate writer; I was always a policeman.
A witnessing consciousness lives in life but with tremendous non-attachment, with great non-possessiveness; it possesses nothing. It lives totally, it lives passionately, but still knowing that I don't possess anything.
The physiologist is not a man of the world, he is a scientist, a man caught and absorbed by a scientific idea that he pursues; he no longer hears the cries of the animals, no longer sees the flowing blood, he sees only his idea: organisms that hide from him problems that he wants to discover. He doesn't feel that he is in a horrible carnage; under the influence of a scientific idea, he pursues with delight a nervous filament inside stinking and livid flesh that for any other person would be an object of disgust and horror.
A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material.
The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.
Hamlet is egotism as it appears to itself, and Don Quixote is egotism as it appears to the detached observer.
One should remain as a witness to whatever happens, adopting the attitude, 'Let whatever strange things that happens happen, let us see!' This should be one's practice. Nothing happens by accident in the divine scheme of things.
A critic is someone who never actually goes to the battle, yet who afterwards comes out shooting the wounded.
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
At times, he even admitted that he'd been more an observer of the world than a participant in it.
Working as a journalist is exactly like being the wallflower at an orgy. I always seem to find myself at a perfectly wonderful event where everyone else is having a marvelous time, laughing merrily, eating, drinking, having sex in the back room, and I am standing on the side taking notes on it all.
Thus I live in the world rather as a spectator of mankind than as one of the species.
Thus I live in the world rather as a Spectator of mankind, than as one of the species, by which means I have made myself a speculative statesman, soldier, merchant, and artisan, without ever meddling with any practical part of life.
I'm just a friendly bystander who they occasionally ask questions of. That's my level of involvement.
