Self-preoccupied people hit the right notes, but often so hard that they sound tinny.
So, especially in the first few months, I had a self-preoccupied question on my mind: How am I doing?
Is there no room for compassion here, or must he be relegated to the role of self-preoccupied object lesson for the ages?
Yet in a myriad of ways we are all being groomed – by consumerism and digital media – to be the opposite: impatient and self-preoccupied.
At times, the piece feels like a satire on group creativity with one self-preoccupied actor crying, "I don't know what my active verb is".
My theory would be that self-preoccupied people have trouble seeing that their natural abilities come from outside themselves and can only be developed when directed toward something else outside themselves.
He presents himself as the insecure son of a bipolar father, a man so self-preoccupied that he deprived his son of any confidence of his own; his father eventually committed suicide.
Though he was unfailingly kindly with us - a sort of benign sea-monster he seemed to me as a child, with his purplish face and watery, thyroid-swollen eyes - he was also helplessly self-preoccupied.
Things happen: Doug, who has dropped out of college, where he was, somewhat surprisingly, studying forensic science and criminal justice — he seems far too laid back and self-preoccupied to be interested in exterior pursuits — gets a job in an ice factory.
Stephen Dillane delivers Tony's monologue about his monstrous appetites with the right studied calm and there is good support from Jacqueline Defferary as the blase, self-preoccupied Samantha and from Ingrid Lacey as the woman who equates burning desire with the desire to burn.
Having just read Michael Sragow's lukewarmish and somewhat self-preoccupied review of William Goldman's latest volume on Hollywood, "Which Lie Did I Tell?" (April 9), I felt sorry for the underappreciated Goldman but mostly for your readers, some of whom may not now discover a book that is a gas of a read and does indeed have plenty of structure.
