A Quote by Albert Einstein
When I was young, all I wanted and expected from life was to sit quietly in some corner doing my work without the public paying attention to me. And now see what has become of me.
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I tried too much and too hard to get people to pay attention to what I was doing, and so paying less attention to what I actually wanted to do. It's something you see a lot with very young bands who are desperate to get a record deal so they're trying to sound like something else.
When you're young, you obviously have people you look up to. People like Andrew Oldham and Nile Rodgers inspired me then, and they inspire me now. But at some point, you start to try to be the best you can be and you're not copying anybody else. I'm just doing it in public, and my work needs to reflect that as well.
You make a mistake, you better hope I wasn't paying attention and didn't see it, but if I catch you doing it and you think I'm not paying attention, then that's when you get in trouble.
Steven Gerrard wanted to speak to me, so I went to see him and we had a sit down over my future. He's someone who had pretty much been in the public eye his whole life, and now that I was going to be in bigger fights earning better money, he took it upon himself to give me a talking to about what I should do next.
But writers experience the world and themselves in a unique way. We look for meaning. We see it even when we are not paying attention, which is seldom because, as writers, paying attention is what we do. We are scribes to the ticking of the days, and we have a job to do. We are not at peace unless we are doing it.
When I sit and talk with a person, I'm not always paying attention. I'm looking at the person and saying, 'What is it about his or her life that appeals to me?
When I sit and talk with a person, I'm not always paying attention. I'm looking at the person and saying, 'What is it about his or her life that appeals to me?'
No, my dog used to gaze at me, paying me the attention I need, the attention required to make a vain person like me understand that, being a dog, he was wasting time, but, with those eyes so much purer than mine, he’d keep on gazing at me with a look that reserved for me alone all his sweet and shaggy life, always near me, never troubling me, and asking nothing.
God does things on his time. He wanted me to sit down and wanted me to get some other aspects of my life back in order.
But the sensibility of the writer, whether fiction or poetry, comes from paying attention. I tell my students that writing doesn't begin when you sit down to write. It's a way of being in the world, and the essence of it is paying attention.
Paying attention at every moment, forms a new relationship to time. In some magical way, by slowing down, you become more efficient, productive, and energetic, focusing without distraction directly on the task in front of you. Not only do you become immersed in the moment, you become that moment.
I wanted to do something new and different. People expected me to do negative roles. I wanted to break the norm, and because of that, I lost on some great work as well.
The big catalyst was seeing my sister, when I was 11, doing a dramatic recital. When I saw her on the stage and everyone listening to her so patiently, quietly, that's all I wanted: for someone to look at me and listen to me, but in some beautiful and artistic way.
James - "Are you paying attention or just trying to make me look like an idoit?" Elizabeth - "Oh, I'm definately paying attention. If you look like an idiot it has nothing to do with me.
For me, writing a novel is more like digging a well than climbing a mountain - some heroic thing where I set out to conquer. I just sit quietly for a few years, and then it starts to become something.
The 'Motown' detour for me was almost like it wasn't work. It was more fun than work, and that's all it takes for me to not be very responsible to other things I should have been paying attention to.
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