Quotes by Sven Birkerts

About Sven Birkerts:

Sven Birkerts is an American essayist and literary critic of Latvian ancestry. He is best known for his book The Gutenberg Elegies, which posits a decline in reading due to the overwhelming advances of the Internet and other technologies of the "electronic culture."
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I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It...

Sven Birkerts

What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny...the time of reading, the time defined by the author's language resonating in the self, is not the world's...

Sven Birkerts

Everything in contemporary society discourages interiority. More and more of our exchanges take place via circuits, and in their very nature those interactions are such as to keep us hovering in the virtual now, a place away from ourselves.

Sven Birkerts

Author Bio

  • NameSven Birkerts
  • DescriptionAmerican academic and writer
  • BornSeptember 21, 1951
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionEssayist
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship