To be brave and make something without the preoccupation of trying to be witty was the task.
"I had the chance to look at our surroundings without the preoccupation of day-to-day livelihood and the obscure view that comes with the pain and suffering of being poor," Tabibian said.
Actors always think every job is the last job and they're going to be found out as a fraud, but it is nice to be able to get up in the morning and walk the dog without some preoccupation about the next thing.
That is why I think it is necessary to establish an authority, not at a political level, but at a professional and technical level, without the immediate preoccupation of representing people, without the immediate preoccupation of consensus, where opinions can be expressed in a strictly professional way, but only in terms of consultancy.
For a time, it seems that he'll be the story's protagonist, a character without distinction, generosity, or even real ambition, marked more by resentment and fitful preoccupations, without recourse to the air of eccentric imaginative liberation that Biswas and modernism's "little men" have.
I would speculate that Atkins may create preoccupation with food but without the denial.
In the process, declaring and making war has increasingly become – the constitution be damned – the sole preoccupation of the White House, without significant reference to Congress.
There's Grandage's wondrous instinct for pace and dynamics that here reveal the play to be like a parody of one of Dostoevsky's black, mood-swing farces (though without the Christian preoccupations).
But if I don't tell you, I put myself in the awkward position of having to convey the novel's preoccupations without giving away the game — a tricky situation, made trickier by the fact that the revelation, once it comes, seems so disappointingly banal.
And that's without taking into account the season's preoccupation with the mandal, that's man-sandal, which managed to expose even exponentially more mankle.
