“..holding a book but reading the empty spaces.”

“It's important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book... it's perfume, it's incense, it's the dust of Egypt...”

“He balanced in space with the book in his sweating cold fingers.”

“What's the point of having a library full of books you've already read?”

“(in response to the question: what do you think of e-books and Amazon’s Kindle?)Those aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.”

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

“In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.”