“Read Homer once, and you can read no more;
For all books else appear so mean, so poor,
Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read,
And Homer will be all the books you need.”

“It is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all that you can.”

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

“You can only learn so much by reading. You cannot learn to ride a bicycle by reading a book.”

“When you have mastered the numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading a book. You will be reading meanings.”

“When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.”

“Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read-ultimately you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books.”

“I've read The Satanic Verses and I thought it a nasty, sneering, free-thinking book… I can understand why the book is offensive and it didn't seem to me to be anything but offensive when I read it.”

“Books, books, books. It was not that I read so much. I read and re-read the same ones. But all of them were necessary to me. Their presence, their smell, the letters of their titles, and the texture of their leather bindings.”

“If many great books seem unreadable and unintelligible … it may be because we have not for a long time learned to read by reading them. Great books teach people not only how to read them, but how to read all other books.”