“I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.”

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”

“Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.”

“Learning is not by going to school, books is not by reading; but knowing what you went their for and understanding what you've read in those books.”

“You should spend more time reading the Good Book and less reading all those novels. What are you going to tell the Lord on Judgement Day when He asks you why you didn't read your bible? Hmm?"I said. To myself.”

“The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know — Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel — the quality of philosophy.”

“I think it was the first novel I’d actually read in my own time, and of my own volition. I’d actually sat down and read a book, and I was 21. Ridiculous. I can’t remember reading anything before.”

“Why don’t you go somewhere quietly and consult your history books if you have no consciences to consult?”

“OKAY. So I was going to the library every Saturday. So what? So what? It's not like I was reading books or anything.”

“I don't know what to do or where to turn in this taxation matter. Somewhere there must be a book that tells all about it, where I could go to straighten it out in my mind. But I don't know where the book is, and maybe I couldn't read it if I found it.”