“Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.”

“Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying, or meditating, or endeavoring something for the public good.”

“Books are like truth serum-- if you don't read, you can't figure out what's real.”

“Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if they open it and read it, they don't have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don't have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or sold, or bought, or read.”

“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.”

““To write my essay I had to read books differently, without giving myself over to either fear or adoration. ””

“Beauty can't amuse you, but brainwork — reading, writing, thinking — can.”

“But we may safely predict that Marx himself will become more and more what he already is: a chapter from a textbook of the history of ideas, a figure that no longer evokes any emotions, simply the author of one the 'great books' of the nineteenth century - one of those books that very few bother to read but whose titles are known to the educated public.”

“In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.”

“I've always figured the only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer and longer until something happens – you know, until it finds its own plot – because you can't outline and then fit the thing into it. I suppose it's a slow way of working.”