Mandy Ingber Quotes

The world is the true classroom. The most rewarding and important type of learning is through experience, seeing something with our own eyes.

Now I'm writing about contemporary Los Angeles from memory. My process was to hang out, observe, research what I was writing about, and almost immediately go back to my office and write those sections. So it was a very close transfer between observation and writing.

Paris is a place where, for me, just walking down a street that I've never been down before is like going to a movie or something. Just wandering the city is entertainment.

In Paris, I rent a bike in the street and cycle around, and in L.A. I live up in the hills so I go hiking a lot.

The thing about New York is you can leave your house without a plan and find the day. You can't do that in Los Angeles. You need to get in your car, all this, you can't just drive around like a lunatic. In New York, you can literally walk outside, and wind up anywhere.

There's no need to travel further. The Los Angeles area is big enough for us.

You can spend an entire day walking around in New York, whereas in L.A., it always ends at some point because you have to find a way to get home.

For research, I like to go to the location of the places in the novels. The first thing that I do is involve my senses: I notice the smells; I open the trash cans and look at what people have thrown away.

If I look at it, it's about being able to get lost in New York, to explore the city, to have more personal stories about New York, although some could also take place in Paris.

One day a week should be set aside for field trips.

L.A. is a great city to get lost in. The best thing to do is to drive in any direction, find a strip mall, and go from one store to the next. I guarantee you will see a collision of cultures you never imagined.

The only way you learn is by doing. You learn through deed, so that's kind of my aspiration for the time being.

I have a dirty little habit of distilling every city I've ever visited into the historical person I'd have most wanted to meet and share a cigarette with.

When I was 19, I did an internship in Los Angeles and lived with a friend of mine in the Valley.

The only purpose of education is freedom; the only method is experience.

You need experience, adventure, and explorations more than you need algebra!

I travel because I want to know. Books and documentaries will only get you so far. If you want to know, you will have to go.

.. since it was true that study, even when done properly, can only teach us what wisdom, right conduct and determination consist in, they wanted to put their children directly in touch with actual cases, teaching them not by hearsay but by actively assaying them, vigorously molding and forming them not merely by word and precept but chiefly by deeds and examples, so that wisdom should not be something which the soul knows but the soul's very essence and temperament, not something acquired but a natural property.

You acquire a language most readily in the country where it is spoken; you study mineralogy best among miners; and so with everything else.

I now know that I learn by solving problems as they arise. Rarely do we learn significant lessons, or significantly improve, any other way.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

Don't preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do.

We're outsiders, and so when we walk through the city, we're there and not there at the same time, participating and observing simultaneously.

Hands-on experience at the critical time, not systematic knowledge, is what counts in the making of a naturalist. Better to be an untutored savage for a while, not to know the names or anatomical detail. Better to spend stretches of time just searching and dreaming.

It's priceless what you learn when you actually do. It's like going to film school times eleven. The best education is effectively to be functioning in the occupation that you want to take on.