“It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .”

“Each time we come to a book we give it a different reading because we bring a different person to it. It is not you who reads the book, the book reads you”

“Read. Read. Read. Just don't read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different style.”

“There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one’s mind and alter one’s whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later:”

“Currently, the Library of Congress houses eighteen million books. American publishers add another two hundred thousand titles to this stack each year. This means that at the current publishing rate, ten million new books will be added in the next fifty years. Add together the dusty LOC volumes with the shiny new and forthcoming books, and you get a bookshelf-warping total of twenty-eight million books available for an English reader in the next fifty years! But you can read only 2,600 - because you are a wildly ambitious book devourer. ... For every one book that you choose to read, you must ignore ten thousand other books simply because you don't have the time (or money!).”

“The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.”