Saul Bellow Quotes

I am aware, as everybody has to be, that there's more competition for one's attention nowadays.

Our attention spans have become shorter because there are more and more claims upon them - more information, more complexity; more stories, more stuff; more.

The conditions conducive to deep thought have become increasingly rare in our highly mediated lives... Now we live in an attention economy, where the most in-demand commodity is 'eyeballs.

The mass production of distraction is now as much a part of the American way of life as the mass production of automobiles.

We're living at a time when attention is the new currency: With hundreds of TV channels, billions of Web sites, podcasts, radio shows, music downloads and social networking, our attention is more fragmented than ever before.

We live in such an age of chatter and distraction. Everything is a challenge for the ears and eyes.

That's what the internet is: it's like bombarding your eyeballs with these myriad blinking colour lights. It's like trying to watch a movie on your phone in the middle of Times Square.

Sometimes I think that our culture lives in its soundbites.

Censorship no longer works by hiding information from you; censorship works by flooding you with immense amounts of misinformation, of irrelevant information, of funny cat videos, until you're just unable to focus.

There's not much point in getting any heavier... there's too many things to read and look at.

Who of us does not recognize that the life we live, however larded with brave talk about values and thought and ideals, is not actually a life dedicated to immersion in the endless torrent of images, songs, sounds and stories?

Speed as a drug disorganizes the personality; speed as the goal of information dissemination commits a subtler crime. People are mainlining our words. We rarely read of the rational alternatives, only of the commands that all must change or else. This is a prescription for public panic.

People are always fighting for attention with things now because there's so much content. Actually, if you don't tell people stuff - you just keep your mouth shut - you don't have to whisper it, you just don't yell. Take the bullhorn off your mouth and it's a secret.

Americans are used to being pandered to and spoon-fed everything. In a culture that needs caffeine-free cherry chocolate diet Coke, you'd best deliver information with entertainment.

Modern man is assailed on every side and almost without interruption by noise - of the radio, of television, of headlines, of advertising and of the cinema - of which the greatest part, far from enlightening the mind, blunts and stultifies it.

We're living at a time when attention is the new currency. Those who insert themselves into as many channels as possible look set to capture the most value.

The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines.

When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.

In this day and age, there's just so much that can hyperstimulate us, and curiously, it is not satisfying us.

Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.

There is always more information than attention

Mass attention is almost unattainable and it's not clear that you want it.

Because of the time we're in, it's so easy to just blend all of it together and it's kind of like you're listening to everything all at once.

I'm not suggesting that the entire nation can't be successful, but there's something to it when you have 150 cable channels and the Internet at your fingertips and video games and all kinds of ADD-addled devices like my iPhone and your BlackBerry and things that keep us busy.

The world is for thousands a freak show; the images flicker past and vanish; the impressions remain flat and unconnected in the soul. Thus they are easily led by the opinions of others, are content to let their impressions be shuffled and rearranged and evaluated differently.