One pursues economic theory in too extreme an extent he is likely to be in trouble; you have to consider the reality and blend what you observe as reality with an ingredient of theory, and a little, just a little bit ahead of the time, then you are likely to succeed.
If you feel like an outsider, you tend to observe things a lot more.
Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.
I think anybody who is writing finds he puts a little bit of himself in all of the characters, at least in this kind of a strip. It's the only way that you can survive when you have to do something every day. You have to put yourself, all of your thoughts, all of your observations and everything you know into the strip.
We didn't start out to make a protest record at all. That would have been too shallow. As usual, it was simply a case of absorbing what's going on around us.
A man from a primitive culture who sees an automobile might guess that it was powered by the wind or by an antelope hidden under the car, but when he opens up the hood and sees the engine he immediately realizes that it was designed.
The more I observed Washington, the more frequently I visited it, and the more people I interviewed there, the more I understood how prophetic L'Enfant was when he laid it out as a city that goes around in circles.
The camera is interested in what you are thinking as opposed to just what you are doing or saying.
I was not much used to women except for mothers. Everything I did, they did different.
She eyes me like a pisces.
Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.
I love to sit and watch people. I love to sit and listen to people.
One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.
When I watch species other than my own, their instinct's wisdom is what most impresses and disturbs me.
I don't even know how to think about running out of things to talk about. Certain things are inescapable to me. I'm connected by the hip with so many things in the streets.
I wanted to show life and to see ourselves and our behaviour through an outsider's eye... from the point of view of someone who knows nothing about being a human being... He doesn't have the feelings that the rest of us do.
People just weren't interesting. Maybe they weren't supposed to be. But animals, birds, even insects were. I couldn't understand it.
We generally write best of what we ourselves have seen.
When I hear people flatteringly say, 'You're an expert on East Asia...' I'm certainly an observer of East Asia, and central Asia, and ASEAN, and to a lesser extent South Asia and the Gulf, but there's always something behind the wall in China.
A lot of times, I'm singing things that are observational and am definitely including myself.
I never expected this to catch on in the way it did! Of course similar observations have been made by any number of people, and the distinction is obvious to anyone who thinks about the subject a little.
I'd like - inviting aliens and have them observe what we do because so much of what we do that we take for granted will just be weird or extraordinary or just plain dumb when observed by an alien from another civilization.
I am always fascinated by the way kids create their own world. That is something I am very attentive to anywhere I go.
The beginnings of science have often the appearance of chance. A felicitous accident throws a certain natural fact under the notice of an inquiring and philosophic mind.
'Normal' is not clinical, it's not autobiographical, and I don't claim to be objective. It's strictly my perceptions and thoughts about the people that I met and the stories that I heard. It was never meant to be an academic work.
