“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.”

“I read trash. Empty cereal boxes, empty shampoo bottles, the bottoms of empty Kleenex boxes, and occasionally even a mystical self-help book.”

“Most of those characters with all the answers couldn't poor piss out of a rubber boot if they read the instructions printed on the sole.”

“[T]he only luxury he allows himself is buying books, paperback books, mostly novels, American novels, British novels, foreign novels in translation, but in the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading is an addiction he has no wish to be cured of.”

“He looked around at the others....They were all staring at their computers, or reading books or newspapers. Not one of them has noticed the weather. Maybe that's how the world was now....Everyone was so wrapped up in his or her own little world that no one ever really saw anything anymore.”

“Well, he doesn't fall out of bed and wrap his lips around a bottle of vodka, does he?”