“Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it's a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it's hard, because someone's in trouble and you have to know how it's all going to end … that's a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you're on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.”

Source: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Variant: The more that you read,
The more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
The more places you’ll go.
Source: I Can Read With My Eyes Shut! (1978)

I Can Read With My Eyes Shut! (1978)

Source: Courageous Leadership

Source: Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments

Source: The Zahir

Source: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Source: Seriously... I'm Kidding

Jot down interesting expressions, forceful adjectives, little turns of phrase, that strike you as effective, as things you might one day be able to use yourself—in both languages.
Public Lecture (2018)