“Read them, Anna. Really read them.”
“Words are so wonderful to read, so nourishing to the mind. But really! It's just a fantasy. One doesn't eat words! one reads them”
“Young men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend “a course of reading.” Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for books read all of them. There is no other course.”
“The availability of books is not the same as reading them, nor reading the same as understanding them.”
“If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?”
“There is a logic [to my reading], but I can't define it. I like reading impulsively. I collect books, I have a lot of them, but most of them I have not read yet. I'll read them when they call me from the shelf.”