Monica Ali Quotes

The one thing I've tried to do is be insightful.

I'm the kind of person where I always digest everything around me.

It is a fatal fault to reason whilst observing, though so necessary beforehand and so useful afterwards.

The paradoxical virtue of reading lies in distancing ourselves from the world so that we may make sense of it.

My natural state is an outsider. I've always felt outside the group, and I've always been analyzing the group.

It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

I thought of myself as an outsider in a lot of ways as I was growing up. Not in a bad way; more as an observer. I often find myself thinking as an observer of science fiction rather than as a participant.

So I observe life a little bit, rather than participating in it.

Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.

I have labored carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate, but to understand human actions

Every writer is an outsider.

Being an outsider makes you a really good writer.

Oftentimes, I need to write about something in order to understand it.

My natural state is an outsider, and no matter what group I'm in or where I am, I've always felt like I'm outside the group, and I've always been analyzing the group.

It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.

You have to have some kind of clarity or understanding of what's happening to write.

For some time now, I have been encouraging people to ask themselves why things look the way they do.

Reflective thinking turns experience into insight.

You have to be an outsider to write.

As a writer one doesn’t belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn’t belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.

I can't remember why or how I started writing, but I think it was always a way of making sense of the world.

They only babble who practise not reflection.