Jeff Baena Quotes

When you're close to somebody, you can never really know how they're experiencing the world.

I have never experienced another human being. I have experienced my impressions of them.

Empathy begins with understanding life from another person's perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It's all through our own individual prisms.

What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.

My strength and my weakness is that I see normally impersonal events vividly and personally.

The world is not outside you.

Much of my work has been done in first person.

One man's magic is another man's gluey torture session.

Writing in the first person automatically gives you a point of view.

Things themselves don't hurt or hinder us. Things simply are what they are. How we view these things is another matter.People think what they will think; it is of no concern to us.

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.

Men seldom understand any laws but those they feel.

The individual point of view is the only point of view from which one is able to look at the world in its truth.

I think there are some stories that need to be told by a specific person as opposed to in the third person.

Falling in love with someone doesn’t mean you know any better how they feel. It only means you know how you feel.

Every essay - the subject matter of every essay - is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world.

Everybody experiences reality in a way that's only true for them.

If you hold a beautiful flower in your hand, you can write a whole book about it. However, you are still just you perceiving and experiencing it from your own point of view.

The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.

I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men.

You can disagree with another person's opinions. You can disagree with their doctrines. You can't disagree with their experience.

Maybe that's partly why I'm an actor, I'm a fairly empathetic, emotional person, so I get very, very involved when it's really, really great when I'm watching - so it takes me a second to click back into reality again.

The power of movies lies in the fact that it enables the viewer to enter the reality, to some extent, of the characters.

Science does not deal with subjective experience... Well that's too bad because that is all any of us ever have.

I'm coming 'round to the view that there's only a personal view of the world.