Gracie Allen Quotes

I only read the left-hand pages, so I finish books twice as fast.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

One trouble with developing speed reading skills is that by the time you realize a book is boring you've already finished it.

Never read a book to the end, nor even in sequence and without skipping.

I read a lot, but at the same time I'm not a particularly good or diligent or discriminating reader. I go through maybe close to a thousand or more books a year, but a lot of times I'll only read bits and pieces of any one individual text.

The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.

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

When I was 13 or 14, I took this speed-reading course. A lot of the things you do in speed reading you shouldn't do to a good author, but I've been reading really fast ever since.

The speeding reader guts a book the way the skillful clean fish. The gills are gone, the tail, the scales, the fins; then the fillet slides away swifly as though fed to a seal.

If I'm reading a book and it seems truly interesting, I tend to start reading back to front in order not to be too deeply under the sway of progress.

I'm the slowest reader in the world, because I perform it all in my head.

When you read, I'm sure you don't realize that your eyes are going backwards and forwards and to this place and that place. Mine don't do that.

Skimming is fine for our emails, but it's not fine for some of the important forms of reading.

Reading from cover to cover - I'm not a great reader.

To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.

Most new books are forgotten within a year, especially by those who borrow them.

I don't necessarily read everything. I read what I need to read to inspire the book I'm trying to finish.

A man who attempts to read all the new productions must do as the flea does,--skip.

It has long been my boast that I can read or eat anything. But unfortunately, although I eat like a Hoover, I read so slowly that I am always on the smart book three years after everyone else has finished.

If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.

Reading goes faster if you don't sweat comprehension.

The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are, --/ Never read a book that is not a year old./ Never read any but the famed books./ Never read any but what you like.

The art of reading is the art of adopting the pace the author has set. Some books are fast and some are slow, but no book can be understood if it is taken at the wrong speed.

I'm a very slow reader, and books of interviews are an absolute favorite of mine.

The Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger (tutor to Nero) complained that his peers were wasting time and money accumulating too many books, admonishing that "the abundance of books is a distraction." Instead, Seneca recommended focusing on a limited number of good books, to be read thoroughly and repeatedly.