“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.”

“One can’t have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr. Watson - paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty.”

“Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.”

“No, give me the past. It doesn’t change; it’s all there in black and white, and you can get to know about it comfortably and decorously and, above all, privately - by reading. … As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.”

“A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.”

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”