No one ever reads a book. He
reads himself through books.

No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books, either to discover or to control himself.

If someone read every book that's ever been written all he could when he was done is he'd read a lot of books.

anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.

But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.

This was what he had once upon a time expected and hoped of all books that he opened, that each be the one book he required, his own book.

Reading remained Musk’s psychological retreat. Sometimes he would immerse himself in books all afternoon and most of the night, nine hours at a stretch.

Everybody wants to write a book.

Everybody wants to say they’ve read a book.

Nobody actually wants to read a book.

A Lumberhouse of books in ev'ry head,
For ever reading, never to be read.

He read at wine, he read in bed, He read aloud, had he the breath, His every thought was with the dead, And so he read himself to death.

"I'm a real self-educated kind of guy. I read voraciously. Every book I ever bought, I have. I can't throw it away. It's physically impossible to leave my hand! Some of them are in warehouses. I've got a library that I keep the ones I really really like. I look around my library some nights and I do these terrible things to myself — I count up the books and think, how long I might have to live and think, 'F@#%k, I can't read two-thirds of these books.' It overwhelms me with sadness." — David Bowie, quoted in the Daily Beast in a 2002 interview with Bob Guccione, Jr.

That fabulous polymath Samuel Johnson maintained that no man in his right mind ever read a book through from beginning to end.

There are no books in this world that everybody must read, but only books that a person must read at a certain time in a given place under given circumstances and at a given period of his life.

He that is to govern a whole Nation, must read in himself, not this, or that particular man; but Mankind; which though it be hard to do, harder than to learn any Language, or Science; yet, when I shall have set down my own reading orderly, and perspicuously, the pains left another, will be only to consider, if he also find not the same in himself. For this kind of Doctrine, admitteth no other Demonstration.