“The availability of books is not the same as reading them, nor reading the same as understanding them.”

“Books, books, books. It was not that I read so much. I read and re-read the same ones. But all of them were necessary to me. Their presence, their smell, the letters of their titles, and the texture of their leather bindings.”

“A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.”

“The great authors were great readers, and one way to understand them is to read the books they read.”

“Whenever anyone declares having read a book of mine I am disappointed by the error. That’s because my books are not to be read in the sense usually called reading: the only way it seems to me to approach the novels that I write is to catch them in the same manner that one catches an illness.”

“To me it was the ultimate book: once you read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived in would ever look the same.”