Gene Weingarten Quotes

When I sit and talk with a person, I'm not always paying attention. I'm looking at the person and saying, 'What is it about his or her life that appeals to me?'

Fiction's essential activity is to imagine how others feel, what a Saturday afternoon in an Italian town in the 2nd Century looked like. My ambition is solely to get some effect, as of light on stone in a forest on a September day.

I try to use all of my senses when describing a setting, and try to think of everything that would impact a character in any given scene.

When making documentaries, the most important thing I learned was to listen, observe gestures and facial expressions.

I think you can tell a lot about people if you observe them as they're observing.

I love reading people. I really enjoy watching, observing, and being able to figure out a person, the reason they wore that dress, the reason they smell the way they do.

Readers want to see, hear, feel, smell the action of your story, even if that action is just two people having a quiet conversation.

There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good.

My advice to all interviewers is: Shut up and listen. It's harder than it sounds.

I cannot stress enough that the answer to life's questions is often in people's faces. Try putting your iPhones down once in a while, and look in people's faces. People's faces will tell you amazing things. Like if they are angry, or nauseous or asleep.

The funny thing about writing is, although you are writing about an experience which only you have had, you are trying to welcome other people into it, and there are ways I think of doing this, and one of them is through the senses, through the sounds and the smells.

There's something about studying body language and non-spoken emotion - I know the innate response. But to really study it like a science would be fun.

Listen with your eyes for feelings.

I think the eyes are very revealing and can expose a lot about a persons mood or character.

All my life, I've been very aware of my body. I have always used it as a gauge of things. When I look at a person, and I see their body, that's the beginning of knowledge about them. Furthermore, I respect the body.

I think reading a room - reading the personalities, reading body language - is kind of a lost art.

I just love details; I love trying to make the reader smell what I was smelling at the time and see what I was seeing. Textures, too - all that kind of stuff is probably my strong suit as far as my writing goes, I would say.

The easiest bit is when you're talking. It's listening that is so difficult. If you get out any Spencer Tracy film, you think, 'Wow, he's doing nothing, yet he's doing everything.'

Listening is terribly important if you want to understand anything about people. You listen to what they say and how they say it, what they share and what they are reticent about, what they tell truthfully and what they lie about, what they hope for and what they fear, what they are proud of, what they are ashamed of. If you don't pay attention to other people, how can you understand their choices through time and how their stories come out?

The hands of those I meet are dumbly eloquent to me. The touch of some hands is an impertinence. I have met people so empty of joy, that when I clasped their frosty finger-tips, it seemed as if I were shaking hands with a northeast storm.

The Colonel's hand was so little, and I grabbed it tight, his cold seeping into me and my warmth into him. 'I memorized the populations,' he said.

The sheer act of listening speaks volumes that even a great speech can't communicate.

In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you'll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.

It's important to tell your story. It's important to listen.

My radar, after all these years of sanity, is still off when it comes to what people do or don't mean.