“In the course of reading he became more and more melancholy and finally became completely gloomy. When the reading was over he uttered in a voice full of sorrow: "Goodness, how sad is our Russia!"”

“He stared at me. “You barely know how to read and you have decided to become a great writer?” he said to me in a voice full of shock and arrogance. I’d finally had enough of him. “Yes!” I bellowed, going into my wrestling stance. “I don’t know how to read, and I’ve decided to become a great writer—WHAT OF IT?””

“When we feel how God was in our sorrows, we shall trust the more blessedly that He will be in our deaths.”

“I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.”

“When Scipio became consul and was keen on getting the province of Africa, promising that Carthage should be completely destroyed, and the senate would not agree to this because Fabius Maximus was against it, he threatened to appeal to the people, for he knew full well how pleasing such projects are to the populace.”

“He thought he was a good poet but he was not. He thought books could tell him how to live but they couldn't. He was a serious but dazed reader. He read Dante and Shakespeare and Nietzsche and Freud. He read modern poetry and books on psychiatry. He had taken a degree in English, couldn't, decided to farm, bought a goat farm, managed a Confederate museum in a cave on his property, wrote poetry, went broke, became a golf pro.”

“One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society a man's life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that day, and far more still on what he reads during it.”

“I took a speed reading course and read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.”

“That author, however, who has thought more than he has read, read more than he has written, and written more than he published, if he does not command success, has at least deserved it.”

“He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more then his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men, he should have knowne no more than other men.”