Mark Twain Quotes

A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.

There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.

I see things with my own eyes, just as if they were the first eyes that ever saw, and then I set about to tell, as best I can, just what I've seen.

The 'how' has a great effect on what we see. To say that 'what we see' is more important than 'how we see it' is to think that 'how' has been settled and fixed. When you realize this is not the case, you realize that 'how' often affects 'what' we see.

The novelist helps us to see things we might not notice otherwise.

Our experience of many life circumstances is a function of our personal perspective and not the circumstance itself.

There are always two or three or four sides to every story.

I enjoy looking beyond the obvious and look at the stories happening all around me - you kind of formulate things in your mind and get excited about them.

Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself.

I wanted to communicate what I had seen, so that others could see it.

I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.

All experience is subjective.

The 'indistinguishable from magic' thing is highly dependent on where a viewer is looking from and not something intrinsic to any particular sort of tech.

Different men often see the same subject in different lights

Prose is something that is persistent in staying in one place long enough to not only zero in on the dramatic effect of something that might have happened, or something that might have been seen, but also in watching how it played out and thinking about the cause and the effect.

To me, point of view is everything.

We all look at the same object in different ways.

If you think there is anything in theater that objectively exists without your point of view attached, you are wrong.

Others can measure their visions by what we see.

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.

The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.

A man sees only what concerns him.... How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!

I discover vision, not as a 'thinking about seeing,' to use Descartes expression, but as a gaze at grips with a visible world, and that is why for me there can be another's gaze.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither. At every point in nature there is something to see. My work contains similar possibilities for the changing focus of the eye.

Photography hankers after the condition of the neutral observer. But there can be no such things as a neutral observer. For something to be seen, it must be looked at by somebody, and any true and real depiction must be an account of the experience of that looking.