Art & Creativity Quote by Susie Bright

Bright is naming a small cultural tragedy without dressing it up as nostalgia: the reader who reads for sheer, sustained pleasure is becoming an endangered species. The line pivots on that slightly awkward phrasing, "more and more unusual experience", which sounds like someone reporting a weather pattern rather than a moral panic. That restraint is the point. She’s not scolding the non-readers; she’s diagnosing what it feels like to be a writer when the room has thinned out.

The subtext is a shift from abundance to scarcity. When reading was a common habit, writers could take being "heard" for granted; the work could be a conversation among many. Bright suggests we’ve moved into an attention economy where listening is intermittent, and the writer’s desire to be heard becomes louder, more urgent, maybe even more needy. That "just so much" carries both longing and a hint of embarrassment, as if craving an audience now feels a little like begging for oxygen.

Context matters: Bright comes from a tradition of frank, public-facing writing (sex-positive journalism, memoir, criticism) that depends on readers who show up curious, unashamed, and willing to linger. Her observation doubles as a defense of depth. Books aren’t only content; they’re a tempo. Losing the pleasure-reader doesn’t just shrink sales, it changes what writers think they’re allowed to do: complexity gets negotiated down, intimacy gets rushed, sentences get optimized. The quote works because it captures that quiet recalibration of ambition under cultural pressure.