Matthew Arnold Quotes

Nobody reads anymore in America. Reading has become the least effective delivery system for narrative. That's sad because prose is the means by which you can deliver very complicated, nuanced explanations of problems and possible solutions.

I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.

My books don't sell anymore. There are many reasons why they don't sell, but one of the reasons is because people don't read anymore. Forget about reading books of detail - they don't read at all.

And we also read Newsweek, Time and several newspapers.

In fact, I don't read newspapers any longer.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

I read a lot, all the time, but often I read books for research, or because they're interesting to me in some way, even if they aren't exactly 'pleasurable.'

Reading is becoming a kind of specialist activity, and that strikes terror into the heart of people who love reading.

I'm always astonished when I go into Barnes & Noble at the number of people buying books, of course, but also at the variety of books they do buy and the extent to which they are not the big bestsellers.

What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.

Magazine articles are the new books.

I read the papers like everybody else, so I don't complain about what they print.

History ... is nothing else but the rise and disappearance of races.

I read kind of serious books about fairly arcane subjects.

I'm not a great fiction reader. I love history. I love history and philosophy.

I tell you this: I'm not an outdoorsman. Actually, one of my things is to pick a little corner in Borders or Barnes & Noble and fall back and just read.

I would never never read a work of fiction and want to know about the person's life.

I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.

I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much the happier.

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

It must have meant something, though, that at this turn of my life I grabbed up a book. Because it was in books that I would find, for the next few years, my lovers. They were men, not boys. They were self-possessed and sardonic, with a ferocious streak in them, reserves of gloom.

People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television; they prefer books.

I believe I belong to the last literary generation, the last generation, that is, for whom books are a religion.

There's novel reading, and then there's the other kind of reading. Take somebody like Carl Jung, the psychiatrist - now there's somebody worth getting into. With novels, I'm kind of fly by night. It isn't something I can be really consistent with.

Newspapers today have almost replaced the Bible, the Koran, the Gita and other religious scriptures.