Sustained Engagement Quotes

The novel is about, for me, sustained and organized looking. I do think that people have a hunger for a sustained engagement, that concentration that the book can offer.

I think if you have a series for a long time, it's in some ways like being in a play with a long run - in that the character stays the same - and so you are constantly posed with the challenge of making it interesting and unique week after week, year after year.

When you're a former president, you have much less power, but you have a lifetime of experience and contacts and if you've got the energy, you can bring influence to bear on a small but still fairly substantial number of things where you can concentrate on it because you don't have to change the subject when you wake up in the morning and there's something else in the newspaper.

I guess after you've been doing something for 20 plus years, you have to work to stay interested.

You and I and everyone else have the attention span of gnats. And that means that saying or doing anything once simply doesn't work.

I've been on shows that went for years and years and years, and I was not ready for that again.

I think people only have so much interest in anybody, and if you barrage them in between the times you have something to offer them you become a personality rather than an actor - much more short-lived. I only work once a year. And that's enough.

Drawing must seek interest, not admiration. Because admiration wears quickly.

Most people who are really, enduringly interested in something eventually find that it's important, too - and important to other people. Very few people can keep going their whole life doing something and feel like it's merely personally fascinating.

If you are going to do something potentially for another eight years, you want it to be something that you can really sink your teeth in and that's going to be different and interesting for this next period of time.