“The educated reader knows, as he reads me, that he is listening to a fugue in four voices.”

“… he’s infuriated that his e-reader allows him to only know theof a book he’s read, not the number of pages. This, he thinks, is 92 percent stupid.”

“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?””

“I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.”

“The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue.”

“My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.”

“Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.”

“I'm listening to Billy Joe Shaver
And I'm reading James Joyce
Some people they tell me
I've got the blood of the land in my voice”

“He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor hear her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.”

“When Siddhartha listened attentively to this river, to the song of a thousand voices; when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb it in his Self, but heard them all, the whole, the unity; then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om — perfection.”