Reading Focus Quotes

I am trying to concentrate on books. You know, I love Dostoevsky; he's my favourite writer.

Do not read good books-life is too short for that-read only the best.

In the drive to improve reading and mathematics, the schools have not just put history on the back burner. They have taken it off the stove.

This is mainly because I spend a lot of time writing and so don't have much time to read; I hate to waste that time reading what may turn out to be junk food for the mind, when there's so much real writing to be read.

I'm an omniviorous reader, but I don't read what could overlap with my own work. It's like tuning a radio frequency - it's much harder to pick up if there's something else there.

To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel, really.

To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.

I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat.

Focused reading is so important, and I'm just as guilty as everyone. I have to force myself to slow down, often printing things out or using print as a medium for things that are most important or for things whose beauty would be lost if I use other modes of reading.

For the moment, whenever I read, it is normally scripts. You start a book and then you think, 'I should be reading these five scripts.'

Sad to say, multi-tasking is beyond me. I read one book at a time all the way through. If I'm reviewing the book, I have to write the review before I start reading any other book. I especially hate it when the phone rings and interrupts my train of thought.

One reason I love the Kindle, more so than the iPad, is that on the Kindle you can't do anything else but read. It's the best, because it does the least. It doesn't even show a clock.

Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarily deflected from your chosen path.

What you don't read is often as important as what you do read.

I really try to focus on my books and readers.