Julio Cortazar Quotes

My mind tends to operate a bit like a radar. I don't find it hard to switch off.

Some people think they are concentrating when they're merely worrying.

The power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without this power would be like opening one’s eyes without seeing anything.

Distraction wastes our energy, concentration restores it.

Follow the wandering, the distraction, find out why the mind has wandered; pursue it, go into it fully. When the distraction is completely understood, then that particular distraction is gone. When another comes, pursue it also.

I never think at all when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them both well.

If you cannot concentrate, you are not so happy.

I use music to focus, like an internal motor.

I get in that zone, even if I'm relaxing or whatever, where I just zone out. I don't even hear anybody. You could ask me a question five times, and I don't even hear it.

Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies.

If your mind is scattered, it is quite powerless.

Concentration is the magic key that opens the door to accomplishment.

I'm focussing on what I haven't attained, not what I have. A lot has come to me early. I don't want to get consumed with that. Winners live in the present tense. People who come up short are consumed with future or past. I want to be living in the now. My goal is to play one full game in the now, but I haven't even gotten past the first inning yet. I start thinking about where my mom is or if my dogs have been fed. The average human has 2,000 thoughts a day. The really accomplished have 1,500 because you can focus longer. I need to learn how to focus longer.

An addiction to distraction is the end of your creative production.

Thinking very often resembles napping, but the intent is different. --Stephanie Plum

The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work.

Stop managing your time. Start managing your focus.

One great cause of failure is lack of concentration.

It is better to be fully present and rested and engaged for one thing than rushed, distracted, and scattered for ten.

If you see distraction externally, you end up creating an internally distracted state.

Concentration is the ability to think about absolutely nothing when it is absolutely necessary.

The mind is a monkey, hopping around from thought to thought, image to image. Rarely do more than a few seconds go by in which the mind can remain single-pointed, empty.

Sometimes the worst thing that can happen is, 'Oh, I'm on stage playing a song,' because you're daydreaming about something else, you're on autopilot. You have to fight that.

My concentration span is truly that of a gnat. Some people have this ladder, and that's all there is - the ladder. I have the ladder, too, but there's a building around it with scaffolding, and lots of windows for me to peek into. Then suddenly I'll remember, 'Oh, there's the ladder. I should be concentrating on that.'

It's amazing how confused and distracted and misdirected so many people are.