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Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point.

Reading is an act of civilization; it's one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities.

Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we're someone else, disrupting the delusion that we're permanent and at the center of the universe. Suddenly (we're saved!) other people are real again, and we're fond of them.

Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else's shoes for a while.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

I kind of go in waves with reading. Sometimes I read all the time, and sometimes I can't get settled enough to focus.

I do believe that reading can help you understand what you're writing and see what others are doing. But sometimes the desire for more information can act as an inhibitor.

Reading is as much a part of life as any part, and it's life itself. And it allows us to live other lives that we might not have lived if we hadn't picked up those books.