“Teaching literature is teaching how to read. How to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away; how to read what the language is doing, not guess what the author was thinking; how to take evidence from a page, not seek a reality to substitute for it.”

“The first thing that reading teaches us is how to be alone.”

“But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.”

“For me, reading is so much more. Books teach you how other people think, and what they're feeling, and how they change from ordinary beings to extraordinary ones. Often they are so appealing and intelligent, you'd rather spend time reading about them than doing anything else.”

“Not just Negroponte, who doesn't like to read, but even Birkerts, who thinks that history is ending, underestimates the instability of society and the unruly diversity of its members. The electronic apotheosis of mass culture has merely reconfirmed the elitism of literary reading, which was briefly obscured in the novel's heyday. I mourn the eclipse of the cultural authority that literature once possessed, and I rue the onset of an age so anxious that the pleasure of a text becomes difficult to sustain. I don't suppose that many other people will give away their TVs. I'm not sure I'll last long myself without buying one. But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.”

“The Art Magicke has rules. It means I have to teach you all my tricks. All the substitutions, the replications, the illusions. How to read minds and palms and leaves. How to disappear and reappear."How to saw people in half?""That too.""Nice.”