“Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.”

“I spent much of my prison time reading. I must have read over 200 large books, mostly fictional stories about the American pioneers, the Vikings, Mafia, etc. As long as I was engrossed in a book, I was not in prison. Reading was my escape.”

“I have to admit that most of the time I read in the same way that I smoke and chew gum and jiggle my leg a lot. I read a lot, but at the same time I’m not a particularly good or diligent or discriminating reader. I go through maybe close to a thousand or more books a year, but a lot of times I’ll only read bits and pieces of any one individual text. There are even certain works that are very important to me (Like Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, for example) that I probably haven’t ever read all the way through from beginning to end, just certain passages over and over. I tend to read at stuff, rather that through it, if that makes any sense, and maybe there’s something a little bit rodent-like about it, like a gerbil gnawing on woodchips in those, tiny, rapid obsessive bites.”

“Reading was like an addiction; I read while I ate, on the train, in bed until late at night, in school, where I'd keep the book hidden so I could read during class. Before long I bought a small stereo and spent all my time in my room, listening to jazz records. But I had almost no desire to talk to anyone about the experience I gained through books and music. I felt happy just being me and no one else. In that sense I could be called a stack-up loner.”

“If you're 50 years old or younger, give every book about 50 pages before you decide to commit yourself to reading it, or give it up.If you're over 50, which is when time gets shorter, subtract your age from 100 - the result is the number of pages you should read before deciding whether or not to quit. If you're 100 or over you get to judge the book by its cover, despite the dangers in doing so.”

“I used to think she was quite intelligent , in my stupidity. The reason I did was because she knew quite a lot about the theater and plays and literature and all that stuff. If somebody knows quite a lot about all those things, it takes you quite a while to find out whether they're really stupid or not.”