Wit & Attitude Quote by Bill Murray

Murray’s charm is that he can smuggle a cultural critique into a throwaway gripe, and this line does exactly that: it’s a backhanded defense of the very thing book people love to hate. He starts with an almost heretical premise - the online world didn’t kill reading; it resurrected it - then lands the punch with “the damn screen,” a bit of comic profanity that signals he’s not auditioning for a TED Talk. He’s making a plain, lived-in observation: our eyes are moving across words all day, even if the words are tweets, captions, comment threads, and recipe pop-ups.

The intent is contrarian reassurance. Murray reframes the panic about literacy into something more pragmatic: reading is a habit of attention and decoding, and screens have normalized that habit. The subtext is a gentle scolding of nostalgia. People who lament the death of the book often idealize a past where everyone supposedly read deeply; Murray punctures that with a shrugging statistic of the soul - “more than people used to do.” It’s not a precise claim, it’s a cultural mood check.

Context matters: Murray is an actor, not a policy wonk, so the authority here isn’t data; it’s vibe. He’s speaking from the middle of a media transition where “reading” has splintered into modes: scrolling, skimming, bingeing longform, audiobooks, fanfic. His line works because it refuses purity tests. It suggests books don’t need to be museum pieces to matter; they can ride in the slipstream of a screen-addicted culture, benefiting from the simple fact that language is still the interface.