A Quote by Oscar Levant

I've given up reading books. I find it takes my mind off myself. — © Oscar Levant
I've given up reading books. I find it takes my mind off myself.
I have given up reading books; I find it takes my mind off myself.
I'm reading more than ever. I used to find it tedious, but now it's like my little friend - it takes my mind off things.
One of the maddening ironies of writing books is that it leaves so little time for reading others'. My bedside is piled with books, but it's duty reading: books for book research, books for review. The ones I pine for are off on a shelf downstairs.
It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them - with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.
I never tell students they cannot read a book they pick up, but I do guide them toward books that I think would be a good fit for them. I think of myself as a reading mentor-a reader who can help them find books they might like.
I loved reading when I grew up but did feel totally invisible because I couldn't see myself and my life reflected in the books I was reading.
The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us - it's all junk, all trash, tidbits of news. The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Staying cooped up in one place is frustrating and I try to keep myself occupied - with yoga, meditation, cooking, reading, watching movies - to take my mind off things.
I can't actually wrap my mind around it easily - I can't really visualize what 2 million books looks like... So I try to keep it real for myself by focusing on individual anecdotes of how my books have helped kids learn to love reading.
I find just in terms of free time I'm always envious of people I know who... listen to music, watch films, play games, read books. I have to pick. And I find frequently that if I've got Sophie's Choice, I'll try to keep up with music and keep up with films. So my book reading and comic reading and game playing is terrible and infrequent.
Reading time is precious. Don't waste it. Reading bad books, or books that are wrong for a certain time in your life, can dangerously turn you off the activity altogether.
I'm trying to start reading books that you gain knowledge from in order to challenge myself more. As a rule, I tend to read easy reading/populist-type books, but I don't feel like I'm learning enough.
I myself, a professional mathematician, on re-reading my own work find it strains my mental powers to recall to mind from the figures the meanings of the demonstrations, meanings which I myself originally put into the figures and the text from my mind. But when I attempt to remedy the obscurity of the material by putting in extra words, I see myself falling into the opposite fault of becoming chatty in something mathematical.
Most of the time what I am reading is leadership books, books on the mind and a lot of deep stuff about spiritual stuff and Christian stuff. So most of my free time is spent reading. I try to read 1-to-2 books a month.
The computer takes up where psychoanalysis left off. It takes the ideas of a decentered self and makes it more concrete by modeling mind as a multiprocessing machine.
Even today, I hunt for the fabulous books that will change me utterly. I find myself happiest in the middle of a book which I forget that I am reading, but am instead immersed in a made-up life lived at the highest pitch.
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