#preoccupation

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends. ↗

— Graham Greene

#creative-process #daily-life #preoccupations #subconscious #superficiality

The passionate controversies of one era are viewed as sterile preoccupations by another, for knowledge alters what we seek as well as what we find. ↗

— Freda Adler

#another #controversies #era #find #knowledge

A remarkable feature of the humanitarian movement, on both its sentimental and utilitarian sides, has been its preoccupation with the lot of the masses. ↗

— Irving Babbitt

#both #feature #humanitarian #lot #masses

I've discovered I've got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces. ↗

— Steven Spielberg

#forces #got #i #large #ordinary

Sidney Lumet's chief preoccupation wasn't art. It was right and wrong in the American city, nearly always in New York. ↗

— Wesley Morris

#american #art #chief #city #nearly

War on terrorism defines the central preoccupation of the United States in the world today, and it does reflect in my view a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy of the world's first superpower, of a great democracy, with genuinely idealistic traditions. ↗

— Zbigniew Brzezinski

#defines #democracy #does #extremist #first

Today's preoccupation with physical theories of everything takes a wrong turn from the purpose of science - to question all things relentlessly. Modern physics has become like Swift's kingdom of Laputa, flying absurdly on an island above the earth and indifferent to what is beneath. ↗

— Robert Lanza

#absurdly #all things #become #beneath #earth

I felt sidelined by the industry, by the preoccupation with finding something newer, younger. ↗

— Tori Amos

#finding #i #industry #newer #preoccupation

To wait for hours to buy a train ticket or to see a doctor is accepted as a normal way of doing things. Privacy is not a great preoccupation, and this is a very crowded country. ↗

— Nancy Travis

#buy #country #crowded #doctor #doing