Navel Gazing Quotes

When I was in college I started writing prose, because a very smart professor asked me what I like to read and I said, "Novels," and she said, "You should be writing them then." Memoir never even occurred to me. I think I was afraid of nonfiction and I was afraid of navel-gazing, and of being seen.

In every decade rock and roll starts to get very serious and navel gazing and kind of self serious and every once and a while it kind of needs a kick in the pants.

Most books that come out with a comedy label seem to be, Eric [Wareheim] and I could have written, "This is our story, and this is who we are," and sort of this navel-gazing, narcissistic approach to comedy we're seeing these days.

Believing that navel-gazing in and of itself can transform itself into something that means something for society. I mean, we are communicative creatures. We desire to sort of understand each other's experiences and points of view. Storytelling is what painting, literature, filmmaking is all about.

I'm not going to let Defense Distributed go into a pro-social NGO territory. "We should really have more women on the board." That's navel-gazing and destructive ultimately. You have to have a kind of white-hot core identity. So far, I'm in touch with it.