Sarah Cooper Quotes

You can't clobber any reader while he's looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him and he never knows what hit him.

All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.

I have a terrible attention span, so if something can keep my attention, I know that that's at least a great start.

I never knew any man cured of inattention.

The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work.

I don't feel I'm very present in each moment. I feel like every moment I'm either thinking about something that's coming down the road or something that's been in the past.

Stop managing your time. Start managing your focus.

I've always had a bad attention span.

The only reason your mind won't stop its endless chattering is because you won't stop listening to it!

There are three species of creatures who when they seem coming are going, when they seem going they come: diplomats, women, and crabs.

It has been a sort of maxim, that the greatest art is to conceal art; but I know not how, among some people we meet with, their greatest cunning is to appear cunning.

Examining the world in order to find consolation is very much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to find our own name . ... Whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents.

Right mindfulness does not simply mean being aware; it is like creating a work of art. You can therefore trust what you are doing; you are not threatened by anything. You have room to dance in the space, and this makes it a creative situation. The space is open to you.

When you can not find someone, it is because you've been misdirected to look elsewhere

To stick to the present situation would be something like a man who was observed in Times Square looking earnestly along the pavement. He was asked what he was looking for. He said "I lost my watch."

The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.

Drama often obscures the real issues

Follow the wandering, the distraction, find out why the mind has wandered; pursue it, go into it fully. When the distraction is completely understood, then that particular distraction is gone. When another comes, pursue it also.

He already knows what I look like," Cath said. "There's no point in being tricky about it now." "How is doing your hair--and maybe putting on some lip gloss--being tricky?" "It's like I'm trying to distract him with something shiny.

I don't read novels whilst I'm writing one; I just haven't got a wide enough brain to concentrate on incoming and outgoing in the same time zone.

Look at the moon in the sky, not the one in the lake.

I generally concentrate on work for three or four hours every morning. I sit at my desk and focus totally on what I’m writing. I don’t see anything else, I don’t think about anything else.

One great cause of failure of young men in business is lack of concentration.

I spend so much time like living in the past or the future. I mean, I think most people do, really. And the moments when you're really present in your life can be pretty rare, really.

Pitching was about fooling people, manipulating them, making them believe in something that ultimately wasn't there. Great pitching was great lying.