Barbara Kruger Quotes

My books don't sell anymore. There are many reasons why they don't sell, but one of the reasons is because people don't read anymore. Forget about reading books of detail - they don't read at all.

The film business has changed so dramatically from when I started.

I get concerned when I see kids on their phones. They don't read enough anymore, anything longer than a tweet.

It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.

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!

I still buy CDs and DVDs, but generally for more obscure material.

The entertainment business remains a business of blockbusters, and increasingly so.

I think the advent of the Internet gave us all a big boost, because by the time the Internet became mainstream and you could get it in your home, a lot of us were used to dealing in fan culture, writing to magazines or anything at the back of comic books.

A novel is too much of a commitment. I tend to peruse Twitter - I check to see if I had any mentions and read the latest messages.

I think people used to read 'War and Peace,' and now they don't; now they sit around with their tablets and watch 'Downton Abbey' and 'Breaking Bad' or whatever, and they want the things that they watch to be better so that they can feel better about themselves for watching it.

If you're watching a film on your television, is it no longer a film because you're not watching it in a theatre? If you watch a TV show on your iPad, is it no longer a TV show? The device and the length are irrelevant; the labels are useless, except perhaps to agents and managers and lawyers, who use these labels to conduct business deals.

Television is where the great movies that used to exist have gone.

I don't know if there aren't any films like 'E.T.' anymore. I just feel that the industry has changed so much. There are so many outlets now.

Being effective at social media, whether for business or personal use, means capturing people who have short attention spans. They're only a click away from a picture of a funny cat, so you have to make your thing more compelling than that cat. And that can be a high bar.

The television business is actually going through a tremendous transition, but I think at the end of the day, television is still paramount.

The core of the movie business remains intact and it's not descending in scope. Studios want movies that are bigger than ever.

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.

Well that's the point: People don't normally take away things from films anymore. You go and see a $100 million film, half an hour later, your biggest concern is what are you going to be eating.

There is a lot of talk in publishing these days that we need to become more like the Internet: We need to make books for short attention spans with bells and whistles - books, in short, that are as much like 'Angry Birds' as possible. But I think that's a terrible idea.

The younger generation is surrounded by the Internet, apps, and video games. But somehow, my books make them read.

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

My personal theory is that younger audiences disdain books - not because those readers are dumber than past readers, but because today's reader is smarter.

I think people seem to want to read pieces that are shorter but not as short as the pieces they can read in small bites on the Internet. It may be that the sort of long essays are hitting a sweet spot between the tiny morsels online and the full-length book.

Kids just don't read any more. They spend much more time with video games. It's just hard to get kids to read anything. Book sales have dropped dramatically, too. I think 90% of the books are bought only by 5% of the US population.

There's a generation of children who don't like black and white movies. There's a level of impatience or intolerance now.