Peter Mayle Quotes

People learn more from observation that they do from conversation.

I learn something new from everyone I interview.

To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That's how you learn something.

People get wisdom from thinking, not from learning.

It's the ugly things I notice more, because other people tend to ignore the ugly things.

Sherlock Holmes becomes more human and more adept at fitting in with a lot of people, but he remains separate from the human race because he finds that a better place to observe that from. He stays on the mountain top because there, he can see clearly.

This is not magic. This is the way the world is, only very few people take the time to stop and note it.

The eye of understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you may see great objects through small crannies or levels, so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances.

I try to see what that person is thinking or feeling about that particular day. I just get more of a sense of what that person's like and hopefully it's more interesting than a normal conversation.

Knowledge is honestly everything. It's not just books and staying behind a desk and having a diploma. There's also traveling and knowledge about people, and what I do and scripts and books.

Every thing in this world, said my father, is big with jest,--and has wit in it, and instruction too,--if we can but find it out.

Superficial people find the extraordinary fascinating, and profound people find the ordinary riveting.

I write about what I know, what I live, what I observe.

I'm inspired by watching and listening to people. For example, my first novel, The Scale, came to life after I overheard two women discussing their struggle with their weight at the gym.

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. Use your memory! Use your memory! It is those bitter seeds alone which might sprout and grow someday. Look around you - there are people around you. Maybe you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn't make use of the opportunity to ask him questions. And the less you talk, the more you'll hear.

Writers, some of us, may tend to see things before other people do, things that are right there but aren't noticed in the way that a writer might notice.

A modest garden contains, for those who know how to look and to wait, more instruction than a library.

Science is a way of equipping yourself with the tools to interpret what happens in front of you.

Understanding like the eye; whilst it makes us see and perceive all things, takes no notice of itself; and it requires art and pains to set it at a distance and make it its own subject.

People, since the beginning of time, have always tried to understand the universe through love.

The originator of a new concept...finds, as a rule, that it is much more difficult to find out why other people do not understand him, than it was to discover the new truth.

Knowing it and seeing it are two different things.

You don't know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.

We read many books, because we cannot know enough people.

Literature is eavesdropping.