Theophile Gautier Quotes

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

No one reads anything. They just look at images.

We live in such an age of chatter and distraction. Everything is a challenge for the ears and eyes.

We aren't in an information age, we are in an entertainment age.

I don't read much of anything online.

Sometimes I think that our culture lives in its soundbites.

When I was younger I used to read everything. 'Why is this guy saying this, why is this article saying this.' That's one of the things Coach Saban has taught me, he does not listen or read anything that's out there at all. He says 'why am I going to waste my time?'

The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television, a distracting and absorbing medium which seems determined to entertain itself more than it informs and educates.

If one has not read the newspapers for some months and then reads them all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted with this kind of literature.

In this day and age, there's just so much that can hyperstimulate us, and curiously, it is not satisfying us.

The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?

People read every thing nowadays, except books.

We live in media, as fish live in water.

So I switch to my MacBook and make my rounds: news sites, blogs, tweets. I scroll back to find the conversations that happened without me during the day. When every single piece of media you consume is time-shifted, does that mean it’s actually you that’s time-shifted?

It is remarkable, all that men can swallow. For a good ten minutes I read a newspaper. I allowed the spirit of an irresponsible man who chews and munches another's words in his mouth, and gives them out again undigested, to enter into me through my eyes.

People in general do not willingly read if they have anything else to amuse them.

We live in an age of reproduction. Most of what makes up our personal picture of the world we have never seen with our own eyes--or rather, we've seen it with our own eyes, but not on the spot: our knowledge comes to us from a distance, we are televiewers, telehearers, teleknowers.

The difference between smartphones and cigarettes is this: a cigarette robs 10 minutes from your lifespan, but at least has the decency to wait and withdraw all that time in bulk as you near the end of your life - whereas a smartphone steals your time in the present moment, by degrees. Five minutes here. Five minutes there. Then you look up and you're 85 years old.

(Feedback) People become addicted to it. That’s why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.

In an automobile civilization, which was one of constant motion and activity, there was almost no time to think; in a television one, there is small desire.

In the last twenty-five years a change has come over the visual habits of Americans . . . From being a wordminded people we are becoming an eyeminded people.

You can have information or you can have a life, but you can't have both.

There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.

By the end of the 20th Century there will be a generation to whom it will not be injurious to read a dozen quire of newspapers daily, to be constantly called to the telephone... and to live half their time in a railway carriage or in a flying machine.

I think that we live in a world - and this is something which living in Pakistan, perhaps, has taught me - and, you know, we live in a world where there is a constant feed from social media, the news, etc., of things that can scare us. And we become so anxious because human beings are meant - are designed to be sensitized to dangerous stuff.