Quotes About Attention

To be in the present with someone else is a gift. The gift of attention is perhaps the most precious and envied of all, even though we do not always realize it.

Reading is first and foremost non-reading. Even in the case of the most passionate lifelong readers, the act of picking up and opening a book masks the countergesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening all the other books in the universe.

After making my notes in the afternoon, I usually visit the fighters in their dressing rooms before they go out. I check what colour trunks they'll be wearing and sometimes the pronunciation of their names, particularly if they're from eastern Europe or Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia. I'll make sure I write those out phonetically.

I'm more of a visual person, but I think that reading's extremely important. But I'm very easily distracted. It takes certain books to really grab you in.

I spend just as much time on how people hear my music as I do the actual music, no matter how long it takes. I'm such a visual artist as well that it always goes hand-in-hand.

Kids cannot follow stories. They don't know what the hell is going on in a cartoon. They like to see funny visual things happening.

Still, I tune out the visual input when it is too distracting, mainly in conversations.

Every day the eye is subject to a thousand tiny shocks as a thousand industries compete for the eye-kick, the visual hook that will lock the consumer into product for that crucial second where the tiny - or not so tiny - leap of the imagination is made.

Guys are so visual.

If one person in a group of ten is missing the tip of his little finger, I will notice it almost immediately. This extreme attention to visual detail is not a virtue, just a fact of my person. It happens seemingly involuntarily and strikes me as neither good nor bad.

I learned in the computer game business early on that all senses are not equal. The best example is, you're listening to a radio play and you're driving down the road, and suddenly you realize you haven't seen the road in five minutes. It's because your visual cortex has been partying with your imagination, basically.

I would have been a visual artist. When I was in high school, that was one of the things... I had to make a decision what I was going to go to college for, and at the time, I also painted and sculpted. I got more attention for my performing, so I thought that was a better idea.

The most important thing for building a robot that you can interact with socially is its visual attention system. Because what it pays attention to is what it's seeing and interacting with, and what you're understanding what it's doing.

I think it's good to have switched to a much more visual world and that people are not all that interested in words.

It's much easier to consume the visual image than to read something.

One of the reasons why I think virtual reality, as a narrative format, is never going to go beyond the short-form immersion space is because the bedrock of visual storytelling is the reverse angle. If you can't look into the eyes of the protagonist, you cannot hold people's attention for more than 15 minutes.

It's a visual world and people respond to visuals.

My favorite films, I would put my answering machine up to the television set and hit record. I'd tape my favorite movies and then I could go back and listen to them again. I only had the soundtrack, I didn't have the visuals. But I think it made me really pay attention to the soundtracks.

I could go insane if I obsessed over every little detail of all of my companies. My management philosophy is to pay attention to the vital few and ignore the trivial many.

Whether one believes or not, religion is as real a force in the life of the world as economics or politics, and it demands fair-minded attention. Even if you think the entire religious enterprise is at best misguided and at worst counterproductive, it remains vital, inspiring great good and, sometimes, great evil.

My parents had this incredibly vital relationship with an audience, like muscle with blood. This was the main competition I had for my parents' attention: an audience.

One has to be always be on guard, because mega-success comes up behind you when you're high from all the attention, and sucks the vitality out of one's creativity.

As adults, when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness.

Theatre is a more difficult visual medium than films. You need to hold the attention span of the audience without goofing up and be able to express yourself as vividly as possible.