Mental Engagement Quotes

I am always stimulated by people. Almost never by ideas.

I hear, I know. I see, I remember. I do, I understand.

My father was a rather active guy, and he was often engaged in something if not physically, then mentally.

Typically, when you read, you have more time to think. Reading gives you a unique pause button for comprehension and insight. By and large, with oral language - when you watch a film or listen to a tape - you don't press pause.

I think the reason that I like so many different games is because I like the way my brain works when I'm playing games. It's more fun.

There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.

If my mind be not engaged in worship, it is as though I worshipped not.

I'm totally active. I am just this side of hyper. I jog and go to the gym every day. When I'm on the computer, I'm reading, I'm writing, I'm never quiet. My brain is very rarely not engaged. Every now and again I will fall asleep under the parasol in the sun, but that's a rarity.

Movie acting, I later realized, reminds me of contract bridge. Each requires the same concentration, intense short-term memory, and obliviousness to everything else until the last trump is called - or whatever it is they do.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.

You can see when people's locked in and they are ready mentally, and when they are not.

I think instead writers and publishers and readers need to go to the places where people are, and make the argument that there is great value to the quiet, contemplative process of reading a novel, that reading great books carefully offers pleasures and consolations that no iPad app ever can.

Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.

He who saddens at thought of idleness cannot be idle, / And he's awake who thinks himself asleep.

We say that children are bad at paying attention, but we really mean that they're bad at not paying attention - they easily get distracted by anything interesting.

Remember—boredom is the enemy, not some abstract "failure.

A mind always employed is always happy.

The thought processes that go through my head when I'm playing a game compared to the thought processes in real life are very, very different. And they're more interesting to me than what you think about when you're doing the dishes, cleaning the yard, watching TV, driving or watching a movie.

Thinking has become a superfluous exercise... purely internal, without compelling force, more or less a game.

But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.

I don't know whether I am ever bored. I never look at myself.

People say Wu-Tang makes you think too much. What's wrong with thinking?

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.

I've found that writing novels is an all-absorbing experience - both physical and mental - and I have to do it every day in order to keep the rhythm, to keep myself focused on what I'm doing.