A Quote by David Foster Wallace
People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.
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People aren't really paying attention when they're listening to your record, so unless you're shouting exactly what you want them to hear, they don't pay attention.
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.
There's no certainty to the next couple of years, but people are paying attention now. And I want to put out a record when people are paying attention, because that's when it has the best chance of being heard.
I think there's been this long cycle of the big companies making a lot of money by underestimating people's intelligence and people are used to it now. So, they're so used to having their intelligence underestimated that, for most of them, it really isn't worth the bother of paying a little more attention to something that might hit them on a deeper level. But you can't really read people's minds.
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.
You think everybody's paying attention to what you're doing. No, they're paying attention to what's interesting to them.
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.
In certain ways, we, many of us, stopped paying attention to the world. I have to think we would have moved on the whole climate issue in a different way if we'd been paying better attention.
I've been accused of not really paying attention to a sentence unless my name comes up in it twice.
I'm afraid I tend to be thinking about things and not paying sufficient attention to one's posture, deportment and general cast of face.
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.
Everybody is saying, 'ESPN is not cool, no one is paying attention to ESPN, they're all paying attention to the Barstools of the world.' Why? Because we're authentic.
Legislators could easily be out-voted if people voted in midterm elections. The fact that we don't talk about all this stuff [ abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, or voting rights] very much because Donald Trump and the general election is sucking all the air out of the room - if people aren't paying attention to their state, they're certainly not paying attention to what's happening in other states.
It's not accidental that products get worse over time; it's because companies stop paying attention to them. They stop caring as much about maintaining the same quality they did when they were just trying to fight for survival and no one would pay attention unless they had the best technology.
What's interesting to me is the fact that creatively, I can do anything now and people will pay attention, and if I suck, hopefully they will stop paying attention very quickly, but if I'm good, then I have my foot in the door, and people have paid attention, and I did a good job, and people are like, 'Oh, wow!'
Sometimes during the day, I consciously focus on some ordinary object and allow myself a momentary "paying-attention." This paying-attention gives meaning to my life. I don't know who it was, but someone said that careful attention paid to anything is a window into the universe. Pausing to think this way, even for a brief moment, is very important. It gives quality to my day.
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