Quotes About Focus

Writers are just like other people, except slightly more obsessed.

When writers don't know what to do with a character, they build up the supporting cast and universe to kind of hide that fact. After a while, you can no longer see the character for the underbrush. When that happens, you need to bring out the weed-whacker to clear some of that away so you can focus on the main character.

And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write - every day, no excuses. It's so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they'd rather clean the toilet than do the writing.

I don't really understand why so many fantasy writers choose to focus on worlds that just seem strangely denuded. But to them, I guess it doesn't seem strange. And I guess that's their privilege. It isn't mine.

New writers don't throw tantrums, they have time. I can make them work on one song for a week.

A lot of my creative energy is spent coming up with a concept that, once I get it, I feel like it writes itself.

We let the lyrics be the focus of the song. Which is not what you hear with some of the zeitgeisty bands, like the War on Drugs, who I love, their lyrics are usually buried and The National, one of my favorite bands, Matt Berninger writes in fragments, in a very impressionistic way.

For anybody who writes, very often, when you finish an album, you are so done with it. You've been listening in minutia, in super-focus.

I'm the girl that writes feverishly in my tiny trailer on set.

You know, if an actor or, say, a basketball player writes a rhyme, it doesn't mean he's a rapper. You got to put in time. I don't say I'm an actor.

As a poor person and someone who now writes extensively about social and economic justice, I've often noticed a lack of a focus on poverty appearing in news cycles or in debates among White House contenders.

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

A lazy man works twice as hard. My mother told that to me, and now I say it to my kids. If you're writing an essay, keep it in the lines and in the margins so you don't have to do it over.

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Most memoir writers will tell you that the hardest part of writing a memoir isn't what to include, but what to leave out.

In real life, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game.

Writing is a very focused form of meditation. Just as good as sitting in a lotus position.

Painting and writing are solitary arts.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

No, there is literally nothing on the business side that I wouldn't sacrifice in a heartbeat to have an extra couple of hours' writing. Nothing.

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

You have to be rather relentless about pushing other things out of the way. This activity of writing, which has no promises attached to it, comes to be given a kind of arbitrary but persistent importance.

Writing by myself in my bedroom is definitely where I feel most creative.