Detached View Quotes

You have to be an outsider to write.

A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.

It is often true that those who sit in the wings can see more than the players.

If you feel like an outsider, you tend to observe things a lot more.

You watch people and study them the way an alien would.

I like the idea of being caught between things, always being a bit of an outsider, having an outside eye on things - almost like a Shakespearean fool.

Everybody is smarter from outside of the court.

Being an outsider at all times is both unhealthy and useful, because you become much more objective about things.

He who follows his lessons tastes a profound peace, and looks upon everybody as a bunch of manure.

I think I approach things with an outsider's perspective.

Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

We did an album one time called White Mansions, about the civil war, but it was written by a guy from England. His looking at it from over there and it not being a part of his history made it so he could be objective.

You can't see all of a place until you look at it from a distance.

An outsider's point of view is always handy.

I think being Canadian helps you as a journalist in America, because you're sort of on the outside watching this big party going on, and you're sort of taking mental notes as it goes on. I think if you're in the party the whole time, you don't notice it as much. And I think Canadians are very good observers of American culture.

I used to take that God's-eye view as a comfort when I was a child. I'd think, "Well, we couldn't find the world meaningful at all if it weren't for death." Of course, that is the smuggest and most intolerable of all perspectives because I'm not suffering from the death or the pain.

we're watchers of this world aren't we? not players