Idina Menzel Quotes

I always tell myself, 'When I'm working on my record, I won't cut my hair.' I get so focused on the music that I'm not really going to the hair shop and getting cut up. I just have one thing to focus on.

I just kind of do my thing with sort of tunnel vision for the story and my role and how it fits together.

If I'm doing a scene that requires a lot of focus, I'll just take myself away and do what I have to do.

A lot of painters listen to music, I think, while they paint. But I hate to do that. It's a horror. I can't really listen to the music. I'm not really concentrating on it, and I'm not really concentrating on the painting.

I find it so all-encompassing when acting that there's no room for anything else when you're in it; you're just locked into thinking about it all day, you go to sleep with it, wake up with it, and when I come back, I really need time to recover.

The time that I devote to painting is not a lot of time, but I do it 100 percent while I am working, and then there's nothing else that counts.

It's a personality trait: from the very beginning, I knew what I was concentrating on. I'm only doing the kernel - I always found everything around it to be completely boring.

No more than a surgeon can operate while tweeting can you reach your potential with one ear in, one ear out. You actually have to reacquaint yourself with concentration. We all do.

I tend to focus on what I'm doing at the moment, and that takes up the entire span of my focus.

Once I'm working on something, I don't do anything else. I'm mono-track.

When I'm in the middle of making a movie, I have blinders on; it's all about just getting the movie out.

Only one sport can subsume my life at a time.

I always do one film at a time.

If you're concentrating so damn hard on a piece of mathematics or a musical - a piece of music or a piece of art, the restraint that holds the rest of - the rest of the world back off and vanishes in the rest of your life.

All my collaborators unilaterally said that I need to just stay on one idea for longer. And of course I understand that. I like to switch gears a lot, and I like this kind of sloppy attitude.

Whenever you do any one thing intensely over a period of time you have to give up other lives you could be living. You have to have a real single-minded kind of tunnel vision if you want to get anything significant accomplished. Especially if the desire is not to be a businessman, but to be a creative person.

A talent is a combination of something you love a great deal and something you can lose yourself in - something that you can start at 9 o'clock, look up from your work and it's 10 o'clock at night.

I love audio books, and when I paint I'm always listening to a book. I find that my imagination really takes flight in the painting process when I'm listening to audio books.

I listen to music constantly while writing.

I have this desire to just while away weeks, months and years. It took me two years to make this record but that was with me trying to condense my process and not disappear down the rabbit hole with all the cool things I've collected. I could take 10 years and not explore everything I want to with these instruments.

I tend to be so lost in the work that I don't notice the weather. My partner will come home and say, 'Beautiful day, wasn't it?' and I'll say, 'Was it?' as I won't have noticed the real world at all.

I'm in lockdown mode as far as what I want to accomplish. I don't let anything else get in my way.

It's all discipline and schedule for me. I mean, it's very easy to get distracted by the real world and things that intrude constantly, and it takes dedication to live totally in your head and be tuned out.

I'm on Twitter a lot of the day because I really like Twitter. It's great for jokes. But when I'm writing, I can't do anything else. I can't even listen to music. I just have to write, and then I can do something else. I can't multitask.

Merlin really taught me how to concentrate, that you play each play as if it were the only play. And if you put all the plays together like that, then you'll come out on top.