Quotes About Focus

E.L. Doctorow once said that writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.

have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.

The eyes of a vengeful man miss few details he can turn to advantage.

Looking ahead is far more constructive than looking behind, said Robinton. He held his clenched fist up. I'd all the facts in my grasp and I couldn't see the water for the waves.

Not knowing how to feed the spirit, we try to muffle its demands in distraction...What matters is that one be for a time inwardly attentive.

The collector walks with blinders on; he sees nothing but the prize.

What release to write so that one forgets oneself, forgets one's companion, forgets where one is or what one is going to do next--to be drenched in work as one is drenched in sleep or the sea.

One cannot dance well unless one is completely in time with the music, not leaning back to the last step or pressing forward to the next one, but poised directly on the present step as it comes.

The collector walks with blinders on; he sees nothing but the prize. In fact, the acquisitive instinct is incompatible with true appreciation of beauty.

I didn't want to talk about my past, and I didn't care about his. For any of us, it's who you are today that matters.

For how many people does fear of the future take away the present as well?

There's a terrible temptation to look at only what you want to, and carefully avoid seeing anything else.

Yes I was afraid sometimes, but not often. Mostly I was too busy. When you can do something about even the smallest part of it, the overwhelming sick horror goes. You stop seeing the whole thing and see only the tiny part you are dealing with, and the fact that you can do something calms you.

I saw finally the futility of all these gestures, that witchcraft is but a matter of focus-that one cann apply one's fierce and immeasurable energies to an act of choice.

Wisdom is strength. Collect yourself, whatever you are, into something with a purpose.' 

there was no time in Lestat's plan for anything but his plan.

Sometimes you need to be forced to study what's right in front of you.

You are but a stray thread that needs to be trimmed.

Sybelle is obsessed with one thing, and that is playing the piano. For the first time she laid her hands on the keys she has wanted nothing else.

We watch And we are always there.

I could feel the attention as if it were an embrace.

This is a specific person, do you understand? Not just some patient . I want to make sure you realize that.

When you come [to a baseball game] in person, you direct your own focus, you know? The TV or the radio men, they might focus on the pitcher when you want to see what first base is doing; and you don't have any choice but to accept it.

Always have a purpose,' his father used to tell him. 'Act like you're heading someplace purposeful, and none of the low-life will mess with you.' He had also said, 'Never trust a man who starts his sentences with Frankly,' and 'Nine tenths of a good sidearm pitch is in the flick of the wrist,' and 'If you want to sell a person something, look off elsewhere as you're speaking, not straight into his eyes.