Lionel Shriver Quotes

Spending an evening on the World Wide Web is much like sitting down to a dinner of Cheetos, two hours later your fingers are yellow and you're no longer hungry, but you haven't been nourished.

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

People are always looking at their phones and computer. It's the first place people turn in the morning and where everyone's keeping in touch and getting their news.

It's hard to pay attention these days because of multiple affects of the information technology nowadays. You tend to develop a faster, speedier mind, but I don't think it's necessarily broader or smarter.

I think we are all coming to realize the web in all its manifestations is a sucking time hole.

I love the Internet, and I love wasting time on the Internet - even though it sometimes ends up being not being a waste of time.

As a writer, you sit around a computer all day, and it's too easy to open another tab and keep Rotten Tomatoes there.

Remember daydreams? No, of course you don't. How could you? Three new text messages have just arrived, and another three, in a moment, will go out.

The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.

I can really waste a lot of time on the Internet.

The Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life.

Look at this generation, with all of its electronic devices and multitasking. I will confidently predict less success than Warren, who just focused on reading.

I spend much too much time on the Web with e-mail and surfing and reading my key sites, and a whole day can go by, and you wonder, 'What did I do today?'

We're living in this world where we have so much media all the time. We have access to imagery all the time.

I love the web, but man, I look at my browser, and there are, like, twenty tabs up there, all jostling for space and time, all framed by a mosaic of other apps, other work, other entertainment... so even when I really am paying attention to something on the web, there's this peripheral haze.

I can't tell you how many times I've been writing and then found myself seven clicks deep into a Wikipedia entry that I don't even care about. Self-distraction appears to be my version of sleepwalking.

The nerds provide the toys that distract the morons. So the nerds are sort of the new drug-dealers. We're the drug dealers of the 21st century because we provide all the brain candy for the mouth-breathers, for lack of a better word.

When you go on your phone to check what time it is, you get so distracted. It happens to me every day. 'Oh, I just wanted to see what time it is, but now I'm magically on a panda video.' This is the easier way, but it's also a part of your personal style. It ends up becoming a part of who you are, and representing what you love.

Television is obviously an enormous intruder. Quite often people say they have no time, but in fact they waste a lot of time on things that are not healthy.

wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.

The American child, driven to school by bus and stupefied by television, is losing contact with reality. There is an enormous gap between the sheer weight of the textbooks that he carries home from school and his capacity to interpret what is in them.

Everyone is so addicted to their damn phone. It's sad to see the filmmaker's work diminished down to a computer screen.

I spend way too much time on Facebook and MySpace to feel too uncomfortable at this. I like to think of the Internet as an effective way to waste time and time.

I'm not suggesting that the entire nation can't be successful, but there's something to it when you have 150 cable channels and the Internet at your fingertips and video games and all kinds of ADD-addled devices like my iPhone and your BlackBerry and things that keep us busy.

It's not our fault our generation has short attention spans, Dad. We watch an appalling amount of TV.