Observing Life Quotes

If you are a writer you're at home, which means you're out of touch. You have to make excuses to get out there and look at how the world is changing.

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

The work I care about is terribly simple. I observe. I try to entertain. But above all I want my pictures to be emotional. Little else interests me in photography.

Songwriting is a really fortunate skill to have to frame living and to find new ways to observe things you're going through.

I can go to a lot of games, but I'm not a player. I'm kind of an observer. That's why I think I do what I do in life. I just observe. That's what I find fascinating.

I once read that the only way to enjoy life is to observe everything with a sense of detached amusement. I don't always do that, but it serves you well to keep it in mind.

We believe that the cinema's capacity for getting around, for observing and selecting from life itself can be exploited in a new and vital art form

What I mean by living to one's-self is living in the world, as in it, not of it: it is as if no one know there was such a person, and you wished no one to know it: it is to be a silent spectator of the mighty scene of things, not an object of attention or curiosity in it; to take a thoughtful, anxious interest in what is passing in the world, but not to feel the slightest inclination to make or meddle with it.

To me, comedy is just twisting reality. It's commenting or observing or twisting life.

People ask me, 'What happened in your life that might have pushed you as an artist to get to where you are today?' I always felt a little on the outside. And as such, you're always observing things. So, I'd be kind of re-creating these things in my mind, and I think drawing it was a way to deal with that.

People are fascinated, for whatever reason, by human drama, and the idea that cameras are capturing ambient stories.

When what we see catches us off guard, and when we write it as realistically and openly as possible, it offers hope. You look around and say, Wow, there's that same mockingbird; there's that woman in the red hat again. The woman in the red hat is about hope because she's in it up to her neck, too, yet every day she puts on that crazy red hat and walks to town.

journalism was for me more than a business or a profession. It was a way of living, of experiencing the world even as I instantly distanced myself from it, in order to recreate what I'd witnessed for the public.

To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.

Being comedian outside of performing, you're someone who's analyzing life, and thinking about it, and observing so much. In my opinion, it can make you feel sort of on the outside looking in.

Making reality real is art's responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader's illusion.

Most writers spend their lives standing a little apart from the crowd, watching and listening and hoping to catch that tiny hint of despair, that sliver of malice, that makes them think, 'Aha, here is the story.'

For an actor, it is necessary to vegetate and look for inspiration. I get that from travelling, meeting people, and observing things around me. I bring back my energy by gaining different experiences.

I'm an observer. I read about life. I research life. I find a corner in a room and melt into it. I can become invisible. It's an art, and I am a wonderful practitioner.