“Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.”

“A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.”

“The Cavaliere has retired to his study and reads, trying not to think about what is going on around him -- one of the principal uses of a book.”

“Most of my reading is rereading.”

“[T]o read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader's own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement -- not incitement.”

“Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.”

“A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world."[Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]”