Vaclav Smil Quotes

People read every thing nowadays, except books.

I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information — and especially of stressful information — is in fact affecting cognition. It is in fact affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.
 And I worry that we’re losing that.

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.

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

Writers do not come out of houses without books.

One of my favorite times was sitting reading quote books, which I did for hours on end.

You're either reading a book or you're not.

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.

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.

No, books. She would have maybe twenty going at a time, lying all over our house--on the kitchen table, by her bed, the bathroom, our car, her bags, a little stack at the edge of each stair. And she'd use anything she could find for a bookmark. My missing sock, an apple core, her reading glasses, another book, a fork.

If a man begins to read in the middle of a book, and feels an inclination to go on, let him not quit it to go to the beginning. He may perhaps not feel again the inclination.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

I am more or less reading all the time.

The rules for reading yourself to sleep are easier to follow than are the rules for staying awake while reading. Get into bed in a comfortable position, make sure the light is inadequate enough to cause slight eyestrain, choose a book that is either terribly difficult or terribly boring-in any event, one that you do not really care whether you read or not-and you will be asleep in a few minutes. Those who are experts in relaxing with a book do not have to wait for nightfall. A comfortable chair in the library will do any time

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.

Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.

It doesn't matter if I'm only to be gone four days, as in this case; I take six months' supply of reading material everywhere. Anyone who needs further explication of this eccentricity can find it usefully set out in the first pages of W. Somerset Maugham's story "The Book-Bag.

The only question I'd be interested in is what books other celebrities have read recently, which is part of my campaign to promote reading.

I'll tell you what I think. I think you need to stay indoors reading more books!

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

To get to where you want to be in the next 5 years, you are either reading the right books or you're not

Read books, discover the blues and don't Tweet.

The fact that we don't read more books in America can be traced squarely to the fact that we have newspapers that are about a hundred times as big as the newspapers anywhere else.

I read books. Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it.