"There is an impression abroad that literary folk are fast readers. Wine tasters are not heavy drinkers. Literary people read slowly because they sample the complex dimensions and flavors of words and phrases. They strive for totality not lineality. They are well aware that the words on the page have to be decanted with the utmost skill. Those who imagine they read only for "content" are illusioned."

But just understand the difference between a man like Reardon and a man like me. He is the old type of unpractical artist; I am the literary man of 1882. He won't make concessions, or rather, he can't make them; he can't supply the market. I — well, you may say that at present, I do nothing; but that's a great mistake, I am learning my business. Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets; when one kind of goods begins to go off slackly, he is ready with something new and appetising. He knows perfectly all the possible sources of income. Whatever he has to sell, he'll get payment for it from all sorts of various quarters; none of your unpractical selling for a lump sum to a middleman who will make six distinct profits.

They belonged to that very small class of persons who still read, who have mind and leisure to find companionship in books.

All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page...

While Lyndon Johnson was not, as his two assistants knew, a reader of books, he was, they knew, a reader of men — a great reader of men.

As Jules Renard said, no matter how much care an author takes to write as few books as possible, there will be people who haven’t heard of some of them.

I am learning my business. Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets; when one kind of goods begins to go off slackly, he is ready with something new and appetising. He knows perfectly all the possible sources of income. Whatever he has to sell he'll get payment for it from all sorts of various quarters; none of your unpractical selling for a lump sum to a middleman who will make six distinct profits.

The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighbourhood. From this prison there is no escape. But the moment he takes up a book, he immediately enters a different world, and if it is a good book, he is immediately put in touch with one of the best talkers of the world. This talker leads him on and carries him into a different country or a different age, or unburdens to him some of his personal regrets, or discusses with him some special line or aspect of life that the reader knows nothing about. An ancient author puts him in communion with a dead spirit of long ago, and as he reads along, he begins to imagine what the ancient author looked like and what type of person he was.

Here it is interesting to remark that if at the present time you were to ask any of the beings there about this writer, he would certainly recognize his name and speak of him as an extraordinary being. “But if you went on to ask what he had written, it would turn out that most of them, if of course they confessed the truth, had never read a single one of his books. “All the same they would talk about him and discuss him, and splutteringly insist that he was a being with an unparalleled mind and a phenomenal knowledge of the psyche of the beings dwelling on the planet Earth.

Literary men are...a perpetual priesthood.

Reading brings us unknown friends

Ordinary people don't know how much books can mean to someone who's cooped up.

Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.

And when I read, and really I do not read so much, only a few authors, - a few men that I discovered by accident - I do this because they look at things in a broader, milder and more affectionate way than I do, and because they know life better, so that I can learn from them.