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A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.

Read much, but not many books.

Any time you can take a book a little beyond the realm of pure entertainment, I think it's a good thing. But I don't really have it on my to-do list when I write a book. It just evolves naturally during the process of immersing yourself in a subject.

If you're going to clutter up the world with more novels, you should do a little more than entertain people.

Finding people who get enormous pleasure from reading books is a more and more unusual experience, and so writers just so much want to be heard.

The importance and influence of books on me has been cumulative: the result of hearing and reading lots of stories about interesting people and places.

I love books so much. I've read more books than anyone else I know.

There's so much more to a book than just the reading.

Today we read books 'extensively,' often without sustained focus, and with rare exceptions we read each book only once. We value quantity of reading over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture.

You have to be a lover of books without expecting more of them than they give - a little pleasure, a little insight, a moment of escape, a deepening of your own humanity. Not much else.