Dan Chaon Quotes

I read a book twice as fast as anybody else. First, I read the beginning, and then I read the ending, and then I start in the middle and read toward whatever end I like best.

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.

Mystery books. I must read a hundred a year. . . I just wish some of them were harder to figure out.

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

I'm omnivorous in my tastes, fiction and non-fiction, always several books on the go, though I'll read a novel in a day or two.

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.

I finish, like, one book in a day. That's my problem. That's why Kindle is good for me, because I put, like, 15 books in it.

I used to read three books a day, sometimes.

I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read

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

For twenty years I read a book a day, from the time I was seven until I was twenty-seven.

She read books quickly and compulsively, paperback after paperback, as if she might drift away without the anchor of the printed page.

More and more books are published every year. If people were not reading them, they wouldn't be published. We are in a different moment. We are now reading electronic books or whatever else, but people are still reading, and people still need stories.

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

I do 30 to 40 books a year, so it's a fair amount of reading. Back and forth between nonfiction and fiction. I usually have three or four things that are open on my desk, on my bed, on audiobook in the car.

I think it's true to say that in 1973 I could read every book of poems that was published in a year, and I did.

It doesn't matter if I'm only to be gone four days, as in this case; I take six months' supply of reading material everywhere. Anyone who needs further explication of this eccentricity can find it usefully set out in the first pages of W. Somerset Maugham's story "The Book-Bag.

I don't have time to read a lot. And when I do, I read things that have just the facts.

The difference between where you are today and where you'll be five years from now will be found in the quality of books you've read.

So many (too many) books are published every year, and it seems everyone is writing a book. Perhaps we should all be reading more and writing less!

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.

To get to where you want to be in the next 5 years, you are either reading the right books or you're not

Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.

As many as six out of ten American adults have never read a book of any kind, and the bulletins from the nation’s educational frontiers read like the casualty reports from a lost war.

I have no liking for novels or stories - none in the world; and so, whenever I read one - which is not oftener than once in two years, and even in these same cases I seldom read beyond the middle of the book - my distaste for the vehicle always taints my judgment of the literature itself, as a matter of course; and also of course makes my verdict valuless. Are you saying "You have written stories yourself." Quite true: but the fact that an Indian likes to scalp people is no evidence that he likes to be scalped.