A Quote by Saul Bellow

The writer cannot make the seas of distraction stand still, but he [or she] can at times come between the madly distracted and the distractions. — © Saul Bellow
The writer cannot make the seas of distraction stand still, but he [or she] can at times come between the madly distracted and the distractions.
Distraction and procrastination come in a variety of flavors... when I'm distracted and I walk over and stare out the window, it's a very different experience than when I feed the distraction by cramming in a few emails or make a phone call.
A lot of things create a distraction, and when you're on a quest as a football team you want to limit distractions. I'm very much on board with that because I am a football player, and things can be distracting. We have 53 people that we have to make sure aren't distracted, because we only have 16 turns to do it, so every one matters so much.
The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.
I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. This may seem too stoical a position in these madly passionate times, but madly passionate people rarely make good on their madly passionate promises.
The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down. We know they have fallen before.
It is still news to her that passion could steer her wrong though she went down, a thousand times strung out across railroad tracks, off bridges under cars, or stiff glass bottle still in hand, hair soft on greasy pillows, still it is news she cannot follow love (his burning footsteps in blue crystal snow) & still come out all right.
I need distractions. Good distractions, not bad ones. A good distraction for me is a great play.
There is no need to believe or disbelieve your thoughts - just don't enter anything. They don't distract you - you get distracted. Nothing exists in itself as a distraction - it is you who get distracted. Why?
I've done lots of songs for film soundtracks and things like that-stuff I'm not ashamed of, but that doesn't represent my legacy with the Pretenders...I think domesticity certainly doesn't make it easy to write, you know, because you've got a lot of distractions and I think a writer is always looking for distractions.
Nostalgia is a sweet place for a poet and writer to be in. But it's an indulgence; a distraction. You can't live in a distraction.
It's not supposed to make you distracted from your life, it's supposed to make you challenge the ongoing distraction with focused intention. Simply discussing how asleep we can be gives credence to the possibility of finding moments of true honest alertness.
Distracted from distraction by distraction
I've trained all my life not to be distracted by distractions.
Sometimes I walk into a situation and I know somebody is going to provoke me - not maybe, I know he will provoke me - I know he will provoke me! And there are times when I simply refuse to be provoked. And the other times you have to use that superior knowledge to carry on at work without distraction, and don't allow yourself to be distracted.
There are times when only America can make the difference between war and peace, between freedom and repression, between life death. We cannot save all the world's children but we can save many of them.
As a writer, you play this daft game with yourself - you're constantly looking for distractions, anything to stop you from writing, but you're constantly fighting the distractions to write as well.
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