Quotes About Engrossment

That was the beginning of modern acting for me. You don't have to tell a camera everything. It gets bored if you do and wants to look elsewhere.

The most important thing for anyone, I think, is to be engaged, whether you're an artist or a journalist is to be engaged in the process at some level.

In the coming 30 years, anything that is not intensely interactive will be considered broken.

I want you to notice that right now, this instant, we are having a conversation. It's really not hard, now, is it? Think you we can carry this on for the rest of the day? (Callie)

Everybody's business is nobody's business, and nobody's business is my business.

I don't Twitter or blog. I'm bad at small talk, and don't have good 'chat'. Talk to me about publishing, and I can go on for hours.

The distance between me and my readers is the Internet. I can communicate with them and respond to every email I get or every mention on Twitter.

I wrote my second novel, 'A Little Life,' in what I still think of as a fever dream: For 18 months, I was unable to properly concentrate on anything else.

Somebody once said that good conversation should be like a tennis match, with each player gracefully sending the ball back across the net; instead, most conversation is like a golf game, with each player stroking only his own ball, and waiting impatiently for the other to finish.

Vicky always did have that kind of mind: since there was basically no activity going on inside her head, conversations went in there and came back out virtually untouched.

I used to always read with a pen in my hand, as if the author and I were in a conversation.

I want to speak to people directly as much as possible.

As any speaker will tell you, when you address a large number of people from a stage, you try to make eye contact with people in the audience to communicate that you're accessible and interested in them.

Music is not a spectator sport, you have to be involved - fully involved - or you get left behind.

It's my fault in many cases because I don't initiate the contact to talk with a lot of other musicians.

Are we just going to stand here all night quoting each other?" Conor asked. "I mean, not that the material is bad, but I was kind of hoping we could get beyond that.

Here, of course, lies the biggest difference between a successful interviewer and an unsuccessful one: the successful one makes the interviewee feel as though he or she is interested in the answers. The unsuccessful interviewer—and I have sat in or listened to enough interviews to know, unfortunately, and disappointingly, how common they are—does not.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.

drawn by the spectacle of sudden death

Keeping the important 18-minute wall in mind, we now have to consider the fast start 8-second rule. The 8-second rule recognizes a law of human nature that suggests that most people decide within eight seconds whether a particular speaker is worth listening to in the first place. In other words, don't piddle away your moment of greatest impact on opening amenities. Opening amenities are opening inanities. So begin with a bang. Avoid anemic cliché starts

Joe and a woman talking, and Julie was piping

What better way to connect with people than by staring and talking straight at them? Don't blink - that's one less connection you could have made.

I try to be of the world, rather than just observing it.