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

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

“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.”

“Oh you the creator, you the destroyer, you who sustain and make an end,Who in sunlight dance among the birds and the children at their play,Who at midnight dance among corpses in the burning grounds,You Shiva, you dark and terrible Bhairava,You Suchness and Illusion, the Void and All Things,You are the lord of life, and therefore I have brought you flowers;You are the lord of death, and therefore I have brought you my heart—This heart that is now your burning ground.Ignorance there and self shall be consumed with fire.That you may dance, Bhairava, among the ashes.That you may dance, Lord Shiva, in a place of flowers,And I dance with you.”

“It is possible to argue that the really influential book is not that which converts ten millions of casual readers, but rather that which converts the very few who, at any given moment, succeed in seizing power. Marx and Sorel have been influential in the modern world, not so much because they were best-sellers (Sorel in particular was not at all a widely read author), but because among their few readers were two men, called respectively Lenin and Mussolini.”