Jean Rostand Quotes

All the things worth writing about are outside me. I'm a lens, not a source. And even if it's not always a comfortable journey, it's always a stimulating one.

You have to be an outsider to write.

Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.

I was always an outsider, always standing outside, observing and trying to figure things out. Which is exactly what you need to do as a writer, I suppose.

You discover how confounding the world is when you try to draw it. You look at a car, and you try to see its car-ness, and you're like an immigrant to your own world. You don't have to travel to encounter weirdness. You wake up to it.

Every writer is an outsider.

Artists can have greater access to reality; they can see patterns and details and connections that other people, distracted by the blur of life, might miss. Just sharing that truth can be a very powerful thing.

An artist's business is only to see.

Everything inspires me; sometimes I think I see things others don’t.

What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are, it takes a name to make something visible for them.

It is only necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance ... To perceive freshly, with fresh senses is to be inspired.

As for the outside world, the artist is confronted by what he sees; but what he sees is primarily what he looks at.

There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.

The artist tries to see what there is to be interested in... He has not created something, he has seen something.

We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.

One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, "What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew i would never see it again?

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.

This thing called the camera, that takes everything in equally, taught me a lot about how to see.

It is the function of creative man to perceive and to connect the seemingly unconnected.

I look at you and I write down what I hear.

Taking time to sit back and watch and think about what you've seen is important. Traveling did a great deal to me. I found that when I travel and just sit in the corner and watch, a million ideas come to me.

What drives the creative person is that we see it all.

I find inspiration in everything.

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.

I'm inspired by almost everything I come across in life, and one way or another they find themselves sneaking into my stories.