Philip Roth Quotes

I do think digital media encourages speed-reading, which can be fine if one is simply seeking information. But a serious novel or work of history or volume of poetry is an experience one should savor, take time over.

To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel, really.

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

I'm not a fast reader. I like to linger over each sentence, enjoying the style. If I don't enjoy the writing, I stop.

Readers who claim a preference for short-form over long often tell me it's because they don't have time to commit to a book-length chunk of writing.

I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing.

He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.

Here's the problem: we are living in a time when the act of reading is changing. The nature of a reader's attention is changing. The capacity for deep literary engagement is changing.

I always want everything read in one sitting. If they can't read it in one sitting, you're going to lose the rhythm of it. You're going to lose the shape of it.

Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.

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.

Reading should be a repeat performance.

When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed.

When I read, I'm purely a reader.

I think readers are always patient. Look at the 'Harry Potter' series. Some have given up on this generation of kids as game and TV addicts, but lots of people spend lots of time patiently reading through hundreds of pages of dense prose. I think reading a comic by comparison is a lot more immediate.

I'm a very slow reader.

I'm quite a slow reader. It can take me quite a while to get though a book.

No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?

The novel is about, for me, sustained and organized looking. I do think that people have a hunger for a sustained engagement, that concentration that the book can offer.

As society diversifies, the number of people who read literature is decreasing. It will be difficult for readers to digest my ideas through literature.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

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

When we read about reading, we get to share an experience that is usually kept private. Incisive descriptions of reading help us to understand what is going on when our eyes move across words on the page.

Every time you revisit a book, you get something else out of it.