“I've read Reverend Kirk, in fact. My uncle's library has quite a few books of your people. I have read Mr. Lang's fairy tales as well. (Katherine Rae O'Flaherty)"Books are not the same as reality," Devlin stared at her. "My world is not always kind to mortals.”

“In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.”

“If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.”

“Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.”

“The women one meets - what are they but books one has already read? You're a library of the unknown, the uncut. Upon my word I've a subscription.”

“Over the years, my experience, my tastes, my prejudices have changed: as the days go by, my memory keeps reshelving, cataloguing, discarding the volumes in my library, my words and my world - except for a few constant landmarks - are never one and the same. Heraclitus’s bon mot about time applies equally well to my reading: “You never dip into the same book twice.”