David Shields Quotes

A reader's tastes are peculiar. Choosing books to read is like making your way down a remote and winding path. Your stops on that path are always idiosyncratic. One book leads to another and another the way one thought leads to another and another. My type of reader is the sort who burrows through the stacks in the bookstore or the library (or the Web site — stacks are stacks), yielding to impulse and instinct.

I dislike reading business books, although I skim a lot of them.

I read here and there in books, enjoying the examples and ignoring the argument.

Listen you have to read a book three times before you know it.

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

We are now in want of an art to teach how books are to be read rather than to read them. Such an art is practicable.

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.

He objected, though, to indiscriminate reading. 'One must have some question,' he wrote, 'addressed to the book one is going to read.

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag...

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

I read so many scripts, that I don't do that much leisurely reading of books.

I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information — and especially of stressful information — is in fact affecting cognition. It is in fact affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.
 And I worry that we’re losing that.

I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. They long for the good old days when people read serious novels.

I see now that dismissing YA books because you're not a young adult is a little bit like refusing to watch thrillers on the grounds that you're not a policeman or a dangerous criminal, and as a consequence, I've discovered a previously ignored room at the back of the bookstore that's filled with masterpieces I've never heard of.

Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry.

Read much, but not many works.

If a man begins to read in the middle of a book, and feels an inclination to go on, let him not quit it to go to the beginning. He may perhaps not feel again the inclination.

The rules for reading yourself to sleep are easier to follow than are the rules for staying awake while reading. Get into bed in a comfortable position, make sure the light is inadequate enough to cause slight eyestrain, choose a book that is either terribly difficult or terribly boring-in any event, one that you do not really care whether you read or not-and you will be asleep in a few minutes. Those who are experts in relaxing with a book do not have to wait for nightfall. A comfortable chair in the library will do any time

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.

I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.

There is a logic [to my reading], but I can't define it. I like reading impulsively. I collect books, I have a lot of them, but most of them I have not read yet. I'll read them when they call me from the shelf.

Read first the best books. The important thing for you is not how much you know, but the quality of what you know.

Some read to think, these are rare; some to write, these are common; and some read to talk, and these form the great majority.

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