Gore Vidal Quotes

The average human attention span was 12 seconds in 2000 and 8 seconds in 2013. A drop of 33%. The scary part is that the attention span of a goldfish was 9 seconds, almost 13% more than us humans. That's why it's getting tougher by the day to get people to turn the page. Maybe we writers ought to try writing for goldfish!

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.

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

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

Today we read books 'extensively,' often without sustained focus, and with rare exceptions we read each book only once. We value quantity of reading over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture.

We're looking at dozens, sometimes hundreds of things every day in articles, videos, and we never look at them again. Even if we do like them, even if we tweet them out to all of our followers on Twitter, we don't return to it.

We live in a time of short attention spans and long stories. The short attention spans are seen as inevitable, the consequence of living our lives in thrall to flickering streams of information. The long stories are the surprise, as is the persistence of the audience for them.

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.

I think we have the attention span of a gnat. You know, with cell phones and Twitter.

Memory depends very much on the perspicuity, regularity, and order of our thoughts. Many complain of the want of memory, when the defect is in the judgment; and others, by grasping at all, retain nothing.

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.

There seems to be such a laziness in - and I hate to use this phrase - the modern world. Everything is pumped out so quickly so that you can read it while passing by, like billboards or those flashcards before movie shows.

Sometimes I think that our culture lives in its soundbites.

The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.

The unlimited amount of information that I have access to has also given me an unlimited threshold for how I need to be stimulated.

We live in an age of sound bites and buzz words.

With all the abundance we have of computers and computing, what is scarce is human attention and time.

I think people who read Internet blogs are usually trying to fit it in during a busy part of their day, and there's only so much information that you digest. Whereas an experience with a book is a little more comfortable, and I think people are a little more willing to really delve into information.

Everyone has a really short attention span, and you have to bombard them with content, content, content.

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.

In the past, you'd have one magazine, it would arrive monthly, and that was your magazine. You'd devour it; you'd absorb all the knowledge in it; you'd read it over and over again.

With social networks these days, everyone needs to know everything all the time. But the problem is, people are so used to short snippets of information that no one has any attention span anymore. I don't, anyway.

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

No one reads anything. They just look at images.