Sustained Focus Quotes

Today we read books 'extensively,' often without sustained focus, and with rare exceptions we read each book only once. We value quantity of reading over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture.

Our motto is just to play the whole 48 minutes. We are here to play it from start to finish. Things will go up and down. We will make runs and they will make runs. But we just keep playing.

Every great accomplishment of mankind has been preceded by an extended period, often over many years, of concentrated effort.

When I started out as an activist, the issues were much clearer. There's advantage to the new media, but on the other hand, you miss the ability to frame an issue that you had when there were just three TV networks: CBS, NBC, and ABC. So the whole world could see the same police dogs. The same Bull Connor and his white tank. Now you've got narrow-casting. The media is all fragmented. It's so hard to get people to focus in a sustained way.

Concentration is a part of life. It is not the consequence of a method of education.

You need to be sharp the whole race, and eventually you start getting mentally tired and make little mistakes over and over.

The artists who endure are the ones who stay focused even after they have reached the top of their profession.

Honestly, it's hard to play with a lot of intensity night after night.

When you're short on sleep, you're short on patience. You're ruder to people, less tolerant, less understanding. It's harder to relate and to pay attention for sustained periods of time.

Develop and maintain momentum by working continuously toward your sales goals every day.

To be able to concentrate for a considerable time is essential to difficult achievement.

Fiction -- at least for me -- requires long, relatively uninterrupted time stretches in which to bring it to fruition. I've never been a two-hour-in-the-morning writer, who could put in another six hours on Sunday afternoon. For me, a novel requires weeks of living in a largely mental and wholly internal landscape. Everything else has to be relegated to the odd hour here, the bit of time there. Sadly, however, uninterrupted time blocks are not what life doles out today to any of us with regularity.