David Mikics > Quotes

“The digital world offers us many advantages, but if we yield to that world too completely we may lose the privacy we need to develop a self. Activities that require time and careful attention, like serious reading, are at risk; we read less and skim more as the Internet occupies more of our lives.”
― David Mikics

“Kafka noted in a letter to his friend Oskar Pollak that “some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle.”
― David Mikics, Slow Reading in a Hurried Age

“Short stories force us to keep our distance from the characters; novels bring us closer to them.”
― David Mikics, Slow Reading in a Hurried Age

“To do two things at once is to do neither.”
― David Mikics, Slow Reading in a Hurried Age

“Reading should not be drudgery, and not mere escape either, but a form of life lived at a higher pitch”
― David Mikics

“Do not dictate to your author; try to become him,” Woolf proclaims. “Be his fellow-worker and accomplice.”
― David Mikics, Slow Reading in a Hurried Age

“Stanley Kubrick asserted total control over his vision, demanding take after take and looking into every last detail. But he also had a sense of how to use chaos, and he clearly enjoyed the bumper car ride that is filmmaking. In his work Kubrick brought together order and madness, mastery and wild defiance, fulfilling a key dream of cinema, to show human energy at its most dangerous and exciting while also presenting a supremely organized world. And so he changed what movies look like.”
― David Mikics, Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker

“Happiness is something one can’t explain. You must take my word for it. Troubles enough came afterward, but there was that summer, high and blue, a life in itself.”
― David Mikics, Slow Reading in a Hurried Age