“All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with mine. I am not alone.”

“You sought the power of my book . . . But that power is mine . . . mine alone . . . carelessly you a lesser entity, toyed with it . . . but it is mine . . . just as the book was mine . . . and now you are mine . . . and I . . . I am hungry.”

“The existence of any library, even mine, allows readers a sense of what their craft is truly about, a craft that struggles against the stringencies of time by bringing fragments of the past into their present. It grants them a glimpse, however secret or distant, into the minds of other human beings, and allows them a certain knowledge of their own condition through the stories stored here for their perusal. Above all, it tells readers that their craft consist of the power to remember, actively, through the prompt of the page, selected moments of the human experience. This was the great practice established by the Library of Alexandria.”

“I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read”

“But what all these responses have in common is that they point to the decisive power of information and stories [...]”

“I am not a great reader and I have pleasure in many things.”