“As any war veteran will tell you, there is a vast difference between preparing for battle and actually facing battle for the first time. You can be told that reading Victor Hugo will sap your will to live, but you can't understand what it means until you've read a few chapters and your eyes are glazed over and someone has to revive you with a defibrillator.”

“In battle, in a war, a soldier sees only a tiny fragment of what is available to be seen. The soldier is not a photographic machine. He is not a camera. He registers, so to speak, only those few items that he is predisposed to register and not a single thing more. Do you understand this? So I am saying to you that after a battle each soldier will have different stories to tell, vastly different stories, and that when a was is ended it is as if there have been a million wars, or as many wars as there were soldiers.”

“It's the first thing I tell my students: If you could understand, really understand, that no one needs to read your work, then your writing would improve vastly by the time we meet in this classroom again.”

“You make faces when you read, you know. I can always tell when you're reading something happy or suspenseful, or upsetting. Your face shows everything...whenever you read, it's all reflected there in your face. Like that time you came over, and Andrew was busy studying, so you read In Cold Blood. You were grimacing and flinching through the whole book, as though it was happening personally to you.”

“If you can read in the night time, you will open closed books! Mystery is an open book to you if you can open your eyes of understanding wide enough to behold the unvarnished truth that excites something to write home about; read and improve your life, lead and get lives better.”

“You know what your problem is?" he continued."What?""You believe a buncha different things, you've lived in a buncha different places, and now, nobody's like you.""Thanks, Vinny. No one tells you what being unique actually means: that you'll die alone.”