Unexpected Insight Quotes

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

It's rare when suddenly a window opens up, and you see a side of a celebrity you've never seen before, good or bad.

Sometimes you need the things you didn't know you needed to know.

I was going to be a lawyer, and I had studied hard, but then it suddenly occurred to me in a very deep, profound way that I didn't want to keep practicing law for the rest of my life.

Oftentimes, what seems to be a street lunatic charging at me spouting gibberish turns out to be a devoted 'Simpsons' fan quoting their favorite line.

The notion of a contemporary epiphany to me is very exciting, because it's a sort of biblical thing. It's something that has happened to people in other centuries or in the context of religious experience.

I'd been painting rats for three years before someone said 'that's clever it's an anagram of art' and I had to pretend I'd known that all along.

Surprise is the beginning of wisdom.

A book doesn't have to be a literary classic, of course, to change us forever.

A good critic is the sorcerer who makes some hidden spring gush forth unexpectedly under our feet.

Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.

Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds.

Script is not finished until it's finished. There's many times, partway through a film, when an idea comes, and I say, "How beautiful this is. This thing was not complete and look what's happened, look what's come along." And it just came along at what might be called a strange time rather than a normal time.

I like discovering stories where I'm laughing and I'm learning. It's like, 'How was I never taught that in school?'

All good ideas arrive by chance.

It may arrive in the instant when we are doing something mundane, like putting our front-door key in the lock; it may lie hidden in the quiet that follows the lunch hour or in the thousand and one things that all seem the same to us.

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

While we are examining into everything we sometimes find truth where we least expected it.

He was like someone sleeping who woke suddenly and found the world...all the beauty of it, and the sadness too. The hunger and the thirst. Everything he had never thought about or known was there before him, and magnified into one person who by chance, or fate--call it what you will--happened to be me.

I remember one letter from a girl in a midwestern town who read one of my books and thought she had discovered it- that no one had ever read it or knew about it. Then one day in her local library she found cards for one or two of my other books. They were full of names- the books were borrowed all the time. She resented this a bit and then walked around the town looking in everybody's face and wondering if they were the ones who were reading my books. That is someone I write for.

I don't see how an epigram, being a bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ.

Serendipity... You will understand it better by the derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called 'The Three Princes of Serendip': as their Highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.

MIke Lee writes with honesty, penetration, wit and the ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected turn from time to time that enriches the experience.

Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know.