“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!).”

“IF you remember every word in this book, your memory will have recorded about two million pieces of information: the order in your brain will have increased by about two million units. However, while you have been reading the book, you will have converted at least a thousand calories of ordered energy, in the form of food, into disordered energy, in the form of heat that you lose to the air around you by convection and sweat. This will increase the disorder of the universe by about twenty million million million million units - or about ten million million million times the increase in order in your brain - and that's if you remember everything in this book.”

“If you read one book you are a clone. If you read two books you are confused. If you read ten books you have your own voice. And if you read one hundred books you are wise. (paraphrase)”

“Suppose you were to read an entire book each week for the next seventy years. You would read 3,640 books.”

“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 . . .”

“Teenagers read millions of books every year. They read for entertainment and for education. They read because of school assignments and pop culture fads.