These attention span quotes will inspire you. Attention span is the length of time for which a person is able to concentrate mentally on a particular activity.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging attention span quotes, attention span sayings, and attention span proverbs.
Famous Attention Span Quotes
- “Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It’s because I understand short attention spans.” ~ Barbara Kruger
- “It’s not our fault our generation has short attention spans, Dad. We watch an appalling amount of TV.” ~ Yeardley Smith
- “A short attention span makes all of your perceptions and relationships shallow and unsatisfying.” ~ Eckhart Tolle
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“He has the attention span of a lightning bolt.” ~ Robert Redford
- “There is no such thing as an attention span. There is only the quality of what you are viewing. This whole idea of an attention span is, I think, a misnomer. People have an infinite attention span if you are entertaining them.” ~ Jerry Seinfeld
- “Now, for my younger viewers out there, a book is something we used to have before the internet. It’s sort of a blog for people with attention spans.” ~ Stephen Colbert
- “I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I succeeded because I have a long attention span.” ~ Charlie Munger
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“According to USA Today, the average length of an attention span of a man in America is 23 minutes.” ~ Robert Fripp
- “I think we have the attention span of a gnat. You know, with cell phones and Twitter.” ~ Jeff Daniels
- “Strike while the iron is hot.” ~ Geoffrey Chaucer
- “Americans get mad as hell with reasonable frequency but quickly return to their families and sitcoms.” ~ Eric Alterman
- “A fellow with the inventiveness of Albert Einstein but with the attention span of Daffy Duck.” ~ Tom Shales
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“I have a short attention span.” ~ Tony Scott
- “The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span.” ~ Karl Kraus
- “I would never have been a good scientist – my attention span was too short for that.” ~ Octavia Butler
- “Children from like 8 and even up to the college-age – Spider-Man appeals to a fairly broad demographic but, like I said, a mean age probably of 12 is a good mark – they process information so quickly and it’s not because of attention deficit or short attention span.” ~ Thomas Haden Church
- “I have the attention span of a mosquito from multitasking and all the things that have affected my poor little brain.” ~ Ian Somerhalder
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“I have the attention span of a 2-year-old. I like to jump from project-to-project.” ~ Reba McEntire
- “Plus the public’s attention span is so short right now, if a skater doesn’t strike while the iron is hot… well it’s not like people will forget you, but they just won’t care anymore.” ~ Brian Boitano
- “I want people to be drawn into the space of the work. And a lot of people are like me in that they have relatively short attention spans. So I shoot for the window of opportunity.” ~ Barbara Kruger
- “Hopefully, at some point, people will at least credit the Republicans with carrying out their oversight responsibilities and with pursuing a principled course of action even in the face of everyone’s short-attention spans.” ~ Barbara Olson
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“Their scrambled attention spans struck me as a metaphor for the way we get our doses of reality these days.” ~ Bill Griffith
- “Being effective at social media, whether for business or personal use, means capturing people who have short attention spans. They’re only a click away from a picture of a funny cat, so you have to make your thing more compelling than that cat. And that can be a high bar.” ~ Alexis Ohanian
- “He has the attention span of a hummingbird.” ~ Christopher Moore
- “I guess I have a short attention span! I’m interested in new worlds, new universes, new challenges.” ~ Alfonso Cuaron
- “I don’t have much of an attention span for TV – I nod off during the basketball playoffs – but when I watch ‘Game of Thrones’ on On Demand, I’m glued to the set. It’s mystical and addictive. Tyrion Lannister, that’s my man.” ~ Steve Harvey
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“My attention span is all over the place, and I overthink things. I’m an insomniac.” ~ Selena Gomez
- “I have no attention span. I get bored so fast.” ~ Carrie Underwood
- “On every Bright Eyes record, there’s some kind of sound collage that begins it. Some of them have dialogue, some don’t. I like it because it can kind of slow down the attention span a bit. It’s a way to draw you in to the rest of the record.” ~ Conor Oberst
- “Americans continue to suffer from a notoriously short attention span. They get mad as hell with reasonable frequency, but quickly return to their families and sitcoms. Meanwhile, the corporate lobbies stay right where they are, outlasting all the populist hysteria.” ~ Eric Alterman
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“My short attention span has allowed me a life of diversity in work and place.” ~ Maira Kalman
- “Civilization’s shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems.” ~ Stewart Brand
- “Our attention span is shot. We’ve all got Attention Deficit Disorder or ADD or OCD or one of these disorders with three letters because we don’t have the time or patience to pronounce the entire disorder. That should be a disorder right there, TBD – Too Busy Disorder.” ~ Ellen DeGeneres
- “The way the media cycle works, the way the news works, and the way people’s attention span works, is that we only learn that people exist when there is crisis.” ~ Edwidge Danticat
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“Being close to nature, in general, helps boost a child’s attention span.” ~ Richard Louv
- “I see young people being dismissed for supposedly wanting only “stupid” and “easy” material, or that they don’t have an attention span longer than three minutes. I disagree with all those statements; I just think they aren’t true. I’m saying that our generation wants stuff that is substantial and challenging, as well as thoughtful and endearing. Well, I don’t know if I’m doing that, but I’m trying.” ~ Bo Burnham
- “People’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. I don’t want to cater to that necessarily but, just for myself, it feels like more than 40 minutes of music is too much.” ~ Phil Elvrum
- “I’m terrible at reading fiction. I don’t have the attention span – it’s awful.” ~ Charlie Brooker
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“I’ve always had a bad attention span.” ~ Charlie Brooker
- “I know there is also the influence of television and being able to zap away so it is a weightier decision to go into the theater than it used to be. And probably attention spans are not as strong as they used to be, generally speaking.” ~ Michael Snow
- “I love the necessary ambiguity of short stories – there simply isn’t time to render every detail, so much of the story that orbits the literal prose must happen in the reader’s imagination. Who knows, maybe the dwindling attention spans means a lucrative future for short story writers.” ~ Matthew Healy
- “I wrote the column. I – you know, – the column simply said that [Clay] Felker is destroying this paper. And I heard that he was about ready to fire me, but two other people on The Voice interceded and, fortunately, he had a very short attention span, so I wasn’t fired.” ~ Nat Hentoff
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“I think Trump’s attention span is super low. I don’t think he has the expertise to actually run a foreign policy.” ~ David Brooks
- “Radio was, in a way, a very philosophical medium. You could make an argument on the radio, and people listened to it. Television is already harder because people’s attention span becomes shorter with television. Cut to a commercial and all that.” ~ Martha C. Nussbaum
- “The richness of Africa, culturally, is vast. That’s the challenge that we have to face, because most of the time, people in the western world, their attention span is really narrow.” ~ Angelique Kidjo
- “If someone can watch an entire season of a TV series in one day, doesnt that show an incredible attention span?” ~ Kevin Spacey
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“For years, particularly with the advent of the Internet, people have been griping about lessening attention spans.” ~ Kevin Spacey
- “People have really long attention spans, and they love complicated plots. TV series are giving the audience what they want.” ~ Kevin Spacey
- “Now in the States if you look at the TV, you see the advertisements, the TV programmes, the pop videos, and the movies, they’re all the same style. I think it’s very condescending to the audience to assume they only have a three second attention span and so they don’t leave anything on the screen for any longer. I don’t understand that.” ~ Jim Jarmusch
- “All I wanted to do while I was a teenager was go out and play most of the time and just enjoy life and have fun. I wasn’t big into school, you know, I look back now and wish I would have spent more time studying and enjoyed it more. It’s not for everyone and I didn’t enjoy it that much like going to school and studying – some stuff I did but some of it I didn’t. My attention span wasn’t there.” ~ George Stults
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“Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.” ~ Marshall McLuhan
- “I have an extraordinary attention span. I manage to juggle two or three different ideas at the same time, and that’s probably, if I have a gift, that’s probably the best gift that’s given me.” ~ Paul Newman
- “People’s attention spans are a little shorter these days. Same thing with food and movies.” ~ Billy Bob Thornton
- “Everyone’s attention span these days is limited to how long it takes to flick the iPod wheel on to the next song.” ~ Mat McNerney
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“You have the attention span of a large bug, and yet I don’t feel good enough about myself to not date you.” ~ Dov Davidoff
- “I’ve heard people say that [I have a short attention span]. I don’t feel I do, because when I’m interested in something I’ll stay in focus as long as it is necessary… If you get off on something I’m not very interested in, it’s very easy for me to block it out. It’s easy for me to block things out.” ~ Dan Quayle
- “Mid-grade readers don’t have short attention spans, they just have low boredom tolerance.” ~ Judith Viorst
- “Learning lines is hard for me because I have the attention span of a six year old. That’s why being on planes all the time is so useful – I’m forced to learn out of boredom.” ~ Eddie Redmayne
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“I’m usually two projects ahead. It’s hard for me because I don’t have a really long attention span.” ~ Joe Swanberg
- “I almost feel like if I didn’t have the gallery and museum content it would be easy to get lost. People’s attention spans are so short; they see something and it trends for a few days and then it goes away and something else comes.” ~ Kalup Linzy
- “There will be a competition among critics for the best Paris Hilton insult. Here’s my first: Her attention span is so short that she can’t even maintain her concentration while running away from a psycho… Maybe the ultimate insult is that she makes her co-star Elisha Cuthbert seem, by comparison, the sexiest and most interesting actress in modern cinema.” ~ David Edelstein
- “The episodic, reactive, almost frantic pace of what is broadcast makes children feel and act frantic and shortens their attention spans and their patience for activities that take time and problems that don’t yield immediate solutions.” ~ Hillary Clinton
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“I can sketch up a storm, and I’m very involved in how clothes are constructed, but I have a short attention span.” ~ Michael Kors
- “As a person who has a pretty short attention span I think of music like that, completely. That’s why I can quite happily change genres mid-song.” ~ Thighpaulsandra
- “The plot details of B movies are irrational: accept that people do things that are contradictory, against their own best interests, have short term aims & limited attention span, and do incredibly stupid things while things blow up. Apart from things blowing up, this is just like the music industry.” ~ Robert Fripp
