“I tried every diet in the book. I tried some that weren't in the book. I tried eating the book. It tasted better than most of the diets.”

“A lot of people assume you can think better with a slow diet of books, but that will not be the case for every reader. I prefer inundation.”

“I was a lonely boy. I spent all my time reading books and watching the world. [some] tried to draw me out at first, but their hearts weren't in it. And after all, they had enough troubles of their own.”

“It would be like a cleansing diet. The problem was, the only diet I'd ever been on backfired. Once I tried to go an entire month without chocolate. Not one bite. At the end of two weeks, I broke down and binged on more chocolate that I would have eaten in three months. I hoped my chocolate-free diet didn't foreshadow what would happen if I tried to avoid Patch.”

“The number of diet books available to the public correlates to obesity rates.”

“Read what gives you delight—at least most of the time—and do so without shame. And even if you are that rare sort of person who is delighted chiefl y by what some people call Great Books, don’t make them your steady intellectual diet, any more than you would eat at the most elegant of restaurants every day. It would be too much. Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed.”