“Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.”

“You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.”

“You are stranded in a culture where you can’t trust many, you don’t fully understand the language, and you can’t read the signs—and at the same time you try not to let on that you can’t do those things.”

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

“Reading is one of the true pleasures of life. In our age of mass culture, when so much that we encounter is abridged, adapted, adulterated, shredded, and boiled down, it is mind-easing and mind-inspiring to sit down privately with a congenial book.”

“One of the reasons I wanted to write this column, I think, is because I assumed that the cultural highlight of my month would arrive in book form, and that’s true, for probably eleven months of the year. Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else…. Even if you love movies and music as much as you do books, it’s still, in any given four week period, way, way more likely you’ll find a great book that you haven’t read than a great movie you haven’t seen, or a great album you haven’t heard: the assiduous consumer will eventually exhaust movies and music… the feeling everyone has with literature: that we can’t get through the good novels published in the last six months, let alone those published since publishing began.”