Bennett Cerf Quotes

Of all the nations in the Western world, the United States, with the most money and the most time, has the fewest readers of books per capita. This is an incalculable loss. This, too, is one of the few civilized nations in the world which is unable to support a single magazine devoted solely to books.

We're in a strange situation where people either don't read at all or they read a lot. There's a huge gap in between. That's something that would be good to bridge so it doesn't have to be one thing or the other. Books could be part of life in a more relaxed way. I'd like to see that.

An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only.

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 don't read a lot of books.

American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it.

I don't think the problem is that people don't read enough mystery books, but that people don't read.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

The only thing worse than not reading a book in the last ninety days is not reading a book in the last ninety days and thinking that it doesn't matter

People read every thing nowadays, except books.

More Bibles are bought and fewer read than any other book.

And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.

here are the top three global resources getting scarcer in the twenty-first century: ozone layer, rain forest, people eager to read the fiction of others. That's right, folks. For the first time in I believe written history, there are far more fiction writers on earth than fiction readers.

My suspicion is that once you have literacy in place, the readership has not changed very much.

It's the same with this idea of a literate public, and also of a democracy in which people have access to and really read the best books. It turns out that even when you create this kind of environment, maybe only 10 percent of the people want to read those books.

Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.

I always have kind of a few books going at the same time.

People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television; they prefer books.

There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass of readers.

When was the last time you read a book? The truth now. And picture books don't count-I mean something with print in it.

It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.

The great dividing line between books that are made to be read and books that are made to be bought is not the purely modern thing it seems. We can trace it, if we try, back to the first printing-presses.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.

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.