Christopher Paolini Quotes

I'm woefully one-track-minded.

Sometimes you fixate on something so much that everything else fades away.

I'll read anything. In fact, I'll read while I'm doing other things, which is not a good idea.

When I'm concentrating, I can be fixed in place for hours. In fact, there was a joke in my office that everybody would come and chat outside my door because they knew - no matter how loud they talked - if I was concentrating, it would not disturb me at all.

I think about baseball when I wake up in the morning. I think about it all day and I dream about it at night. The only time I don't think about it is when I'm playing it.

I write in a noisy, distracting world so the books can be read there.

When I'm shooting, that's all I do.

When I work on stories, I tend to lose sight of everything else. I forget to pay bills or to shave. I don't change my clothes as often as I should.

Are you acquainted with the mood of mind in which, if you were seated alone, and the cat licking its kitten on the rug before you, you would watch the operation so intently that puss's neglect of one ear would put you seriously out of temper?

If your mind is scattered, it is quite powerless.

You can be highly concentrated on a person, on a problem, and be so good at excluding all other material that that becomes not just the focus of your experience, but practically the sole content of your experience, everything else falling by the wayside.

I've always thought that if my death was imminent, I would read. When I can't focus on a book, I tend to keep reading the same page. My guess is, I would've read, like the first page of Nicholas Nickleby over and over again.

If I'm really working on something, writing or painting or really concentrating, I don't even think about brushing my hair.

Every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working mood.

It gives me a sense of tunnel vision.

If you think of a school drawing while you work, your drawing will look like one.

I love to dream, but I never try to dream and think at the same time.

[When working on a book] I have an almost complete detachment from the world I live in, a sort of armor against distraction. I talk to people, move about, appear on the surface much as usual. But later on I have only a confused memory of what has happened during that period.

I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under way, I don't want to do anything else. I don't go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It's a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I'm too interested in many other things.

Serious reading is hardly a social activity and every halfway serious reader is perpetually subject to a form of coitus interruptus. Family members or friends who lack the desire, the courage, or the opportunity to burst in on you when there's some indication that you could be sexually entwined will seldom hesitate to interject themselves between you and a page, even though the act of reading is often as intimate and intense as a full-fledged carnal embrace.

If you see distraction externally, you end up creating an internally distracted state.

I've done a fair amount of that stuff... when we did 'Lord of the Rings' the transformation sequence from Smeagol to Gollum was a 19-hour make-up job. You have to have a kind of zen button that you press and allow the mind to be focused in a certain way.

The breath of the mind is attention.

But there was not a moment when she did not see Carol in her mind, and all she saw, she seemed to see through Carol. That evening, the dark flat streets of New York, the tomorrow of work, the milk bottle dropped and broken in her sink, became unimportant. She flung herself on her bed and drew a line with a pencil on a piece of paper. And another line, carefully, and another. A world was born around her, like a bright forest with a million shimmering leaves.

I don't want to deal with the underneath while I'm, you know, while I'm making it or while I'm writing it or when I'm making it. Because again, I don't want to hit these nails on the head too strongly.