Howard Jacobson Quotes

Once you get the right image the details aren't that important.

A full mind is an empty bat.

It is easy to answer the ultimate questions - it saves you bothering with the immediate ones.

Clarity proceeds Mastery!

Clarity breeds mastery.

‎Be careful not to keep your eyes glued to detail. Stand far enough away to get a perspective of the whole.

You can't see the forest for the trees.

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.

You can't be chasing 15 rabbits. Otherwise, the public mind cannot follow you.

It's very easy to get caught up in everything that's going on and just daily stuff being a distraction. When you have all that taken away from you, your daily activity becomes a lot more subtle, and you appreciate it all a lot more.

When you take away the phone and e-mail and you don't have a million things to run around to, it allows your mind the space to think more expansively about the things that matter.

Do you, and the rest is background noise.

Happiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.

I am a firm believer that if you can explain it to a kid, you're on the right track.

When you try to communicate too many ideas, sometimes you wind up communicating nothing.

To help you focus, to help you really understand what you're doing, you have to say no a lot. When you say yes to everything, you get distracted. When you say no, you have to get the one thing you're doing really right.

The next point - that's all you must think about.

An expert is someone who has succeeded in making decisions and judgements simpler through knowing what to pay attention to and what to ignore.

If I try to articulate every little detail in a drawing, it would be like missing the forest for the trees, so it's just about getting the outline of the forest.

I don't put the focus on things that don't matter.

I sometimes think less is more. If you cut yourself in too many places, it is hard to execute.

I was never, ever physically afraid. My terms of reference were basic and simple: put the ball in the net. That was my job, that's the way I saw it, and I allowed nothing and nobody to distract me from that purpose.

There's a lot of pressure and criticism in a crisis, but you can't miss the wood for the trees.

I get very caught up in the day-to-day and immersed in the scenes as they unfold. It's harder for me, as I'm filming, to see the larger story.