Jay DeMarcus Quotes

We live in a time of short attention spans and long stories. The short attention spans are seen as inevitable, the consequence of living our lives in thrall to flickering streams of information. The long stories are the surprise, as is the persistence of the audience for them.

I feel like my competition is everything else that's competing for people's attention, not just other print magazines, newspapers and cable. It's your kid's report card and the games you want to play, all the things that compete for people's time.

It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don't read anymore.

Sometimes I think that our culture lives in its soundbites.

Some millennials have completely stopped watching TV. So for them, we've created special digital content for handheld devices only. We've paid close attention to how to present online content effectively. We try to catch their attention within the first five seconds - otherwise, they click onto a different content.

People put clips of me up. There are quotes from me. I've written books, of course. I'm on Twitter. There are dozens of ways to consume my offerings, and a lecture in a large venue is really only just one of them. So I have no concerns about how much access people would have to me no matter what is the capacity of your pocketbook.

I don't really think about film or television or going directly to the internet. I just think about doing something that people are going to get excited about.

It's difficult to keep anything fresh for an audience these days. With technology being what it is people seem to know everything there is to know about a film before you've even made it.

There's always the danger that people will simply sign online petitions, the way they used to just mail in checks, and there's the greater possibility we'll just spend our whole lives staring at screens and never get anything done.

By nature, I'm like a 90-year-old woman, so the whole internet and Twitter and Facebook, and all of that, I'm very new to. But, I am quite shocked at how much fun it is to be able to reach out to people, on a daily basis, and keep content out there, and how much it actually really does help promote things, in such a different way.

People have an infinite attention span if you are entertaining them.

For most people, there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.

We're living at a time when attention is the new currency.

What I’ve learned most clearly from blogs is that the majority of them write about the problems from the outside for a reason—because they are missing the abilities that allow people to move to the inside.

I always want everything read in one sitting. If they can't read it in one sitting, you're going to lose the rhythm of it. You're going to lose the shape of it.

It took thirty-eight years before 50 million people gained access to radios. It took television thirteen years to earn an audience that size. It took Instagram a year and a half.

Not only are bloggers suckers for the remarkable, so are the people who read blogs.

I want people to just be paying attention even if they're not necessarily laughing at something, or if it takes them a while to get something, I don't mind that. If half the crowd gets the joke and the other half is sitting there scratching their heads, that's just as good for me if I like the joke, because I feel like it just brings people in more.

There's usually a few people who are like, "Say... what would that look like on our channel?" Interest can be expressed without directly expressing interest.

People only worry about the uncanny for about a week; that's the end of their attention span. After that, suspicions turn into shtick.

I've heard people say that [I have a short attention span]. I don't feel I do, because when I'm interested in something I'll stay in focus as long as it is necessary... If you get off on something I'm not very interested in, it's very easy for me to block it out. It's easy for me to block things out.

My fans probably know what I had for breakfast that morning. And that's the cool part. And I respond to people, if they post on my blog, I'm like, "Oh, that's really cool you read that book, that fantasy series!" It's almost like they're my friends in a sense. There's less separation. They know me more as a human being with my flaws, versus some kind of actor on a pedestal.

Sometimes I go and I'll look at people's comments and then responses, covers, choreography and fan videos and after a couple hours it's like, uhhh this is a little like...I'm like don't indulge in right now.

One thing I've learned from 35 years in the classroom is that people learn best when they are laughing, when they are emotionally hit, that it's both the brain and the heart.

Watching old movies is like spending an evening with those people next door. They bore us, and we wouldn't go out of our way to see them; we drop in on them because they're so close. If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago. Like Lot's wife, we are tempted to take another look, attracted not by evil but by something that seems much more shameful -- our own innocence.