Michael Dirda Quotes

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.

There are books that are made for you to sit and puzzle over and spend time with.

If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.

The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable.

I don't think there's anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book.

The questions that our society must ask revolve around whether the time-consuming demands of the deep-reading processes will be lost in a culture whose principal mediums advantage speed, multitasking, and processing the next and the next piece of information.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

An interesting thing about book groups, it seems to me, is that there is no correlation between a brilliant book and a brilliant discussion. The first seems sometimes even to undermine the second.

People get their information in different ways now. And we are a little poorer for it, because the way you get information affects what you learn.

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.

The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span.

I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.

We didn't have a television, so I grew up with books. This isn't to suggest I'm an intellectual, but I do read a lot because part of acting is an exploration of literature.

You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.

Henry Kissinger once told me he was very concerned about the Internet's impact on people's ability to absorb information in a concentrated way, because we've become accustomed to looking up something, getting a snippet and being satisfied with that - as opposed to reading through and considering a weighty tome that goes into great depth.

It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don't read anymore.

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

The greatest texts, I think, first dazzle, then with careful rereading, they instruct. I have learned from Virginia Woolf more than I even know how to articulate.

I read all the time, and I'm often struck by something I'm reading.

It's a very powerful, emotional thing to read a book, and to reduce it to a series of questions in a test strips something away from the book.

We are not going to get rid of the digital media - nor should we want to - and so our challenge is to use the media to determine the truth, rather than to let the media obfuscate matters.

The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it.

Focused reading is so important, and I'm just as guilty as everyone. I have to force myself to slow down, often printing things out or using print as a medium for things that are most important or for things whose beauty would be lost if I use other modes of reading.

The same plasticity that allows us to form a reading circuit to begin with, and short-circuit the development of deep reading if we allow it, also allows us to learn how to duplicate deep reading in a new environment. We cannot go backwards. As children move more toward an immersion in digital media, we have to figure out ways to read deeply there.

I stay up on current events. I read 'The New Yorker' and 'The Economist.' I go to community meetings to see what concerns the people in my neighborhood. I studied literature in college, so I also continue to read poetry, literature, and novels.