Quotes About Distraction

First of all I'm not a fan of Twitter. Nothing against their program or what they have, but as an athlete I think you need to get off of Twitter.

You can be totally focused on the game and all of a sudden at the Garden, you'll snap and go, 'Whoa!' It's super loud and you can't help but take a second to admire what's going on.

I'm trying to stay focused on what I'm doing. I don't want a whole lot of things going on - people to call back, or text messages or whatever. I chill out, relax a little bit, and then I don't have those issues.

The one complaint about the Internet that I wholeheartedly endorse is that most of these tools have been designed to peck at us like ducks: 'Hey, there's a new reply to your comment! Come look at it!'

I get lonely - I'm not going to lie about that... I kind of signed up in my mind that I'm giving myself wholeheartedly, full-throttle to my creative life, and I don't want to be distracted.

My mind wanders terribly. I'm not wholly annoyed by my daydreaming as it has been immense use to me as regards imaginative thought, but it doesn't help when it comes to concentration. And writing needs concentration - lots of it.

Focused reading is so important, and I'm just as guilty as everyone. I have to force myself to slow down, often printing things out or using print as a medium for things that are most important or for things whose beauty would be lost if I use other modes of reading.

Mental fitness is served by consciously redirecting our attention away from the constant bombardment from the media whose reason to be seems to be focused on keeping us in a state of constant alert.

You try to do the best with what you've got and ignore everything else. That's why horses get blinders in horse racing: You look at the horse next to you, and you lose a step.

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?

I don't write listening to music, and in a way it seems silly that any writer should have to explain why not, as it's possibly no different from saying you don't eat gourmet dinners or play tennis while you're at the keyboard.

You must avoid sloth, that wicked siren.

The wider world is a click away, but whether we mean to or not, we're usually filtering it out.

I get lonely when I'm a Playstation widow.

I get more distracted by hair or a really bad wig than I do costumes any day of the week.

I can't tell you how many times I've been writing and then found myself seven clicks deep into a Wikipedia entry that I don't even care about. Self-distraction appears to be my version of sleepwalking.

Think about it. If it's taking pictures, it's not a cellphone. If it has a McDonald's app to tell you where McDonald's is based on your GPS location, that's not a cellphone. If you can get Wikipedia or go to Google, that's not a cellphone.

Always gotta keep busy or the voices start telling me to do wild things.

The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write a bad sentence on the computer, then it's very tempting to go back and fidget with it and spend another 20 minutes trying to make it into a good sentence.

I try not to bring my phone to the gym - it's too tempting to play with it.

I have brought a PS2 on set with me before. But games can be really addicting, and that's dangerous. So I tend to keep it fairly limited on a certain level.

Once I start writing about something, it goes off rather fast, and sometimes details which might be interesting such as what the room looked like or what somebody said that was not exactly on the same subject tend to get lost.

My biggest hurdle usually has to do with concentration. I have a tendency to kind of start working on something, and then, all of a sudden, I'll totally divert and do something totally different.

I think there's a tendency for modern man to become dominated by gadgets and machines, taking us further and further away from the things I've been talking about.