“He's not one for reading, which to me is like saying you're not one for breathing.”

“A woman at one of mother's parties once said to me, "Do you like reading?" which smote us all to silence, for how could one tell her that books are like having a bath or sleeping, or eating bread - absolute necessities which one never thinks of in terms of appreciation. And we all sat waiting for her to say that she had so little time for reading, before ruling her right out for ever and ever.”

“But you're like me,” he says. “An outsider. Different. A freak. We're both weird, which is why we get along.”

“He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.”

“One of the reasons that metaphor and symbolism are important in books is because they are also important to life. Like, for example say you're in high school and you're a boy and you say to a girl: "Do you like anyone right now?", that's not the question you're asking. The question you're like is do you like ME right now.”

“You should always have 2 books...the one you're reading and the one you're writing.”