“If minds are truly alive they will seek out books, for books are the human race recounting its memorable experiences, confronting its problems, searching for solutions, drawing the blueprints of it futures.”

“I have my own particular sorrows, loves, delights; and you have yours. But sorrow, gladness, yearning, hope, love, belong to all of us, in all times and in all places. Music is the only means whereby we feel these emotions in their universality.”

“To the immature, other people are not real.”

“When the government puts its imprimatur on a particular religion it conveys a message of exclusion to all those who do not adhere to the favored beliefs. A government cannot be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some.”

“If written in the three-letter words of the four-letter alphabet,a human being is determined by a genetic narrative long enough to fill the equivalent of 500 Bibles.In the meantime human beings have discovered this for themselves. That's right. They have uncovered our profoundest concept -- namely, that life is ultimately reading. They themselves are the Book of Books.”

“The process of reading a book takes a while to get used to (in this future society). It's so slow and laborious. But once you get into it, once you forget the way you're reading and concentrate on what you're reading, it becomes a really unique experience. You have to work to draw meaning from it rather than having a meaning given to you. It doesn't tell you how to think.”

“The real artist with no tear in his eye and no sadness in his heart, puts the pages in the fire and does it again!""All art is a metaphor it's by telling you one thing when your mean something else.The Old Man in the Sea is not about fishing!""Writing a book is like torture that you don't know, but after it’s done and there it is. It's a joy like unlike anything else, I think it's the closest that a man can come to knowing what is feels like to have a baby.”