No matter how much you improve something that is basically an unpleasant experience, it's an unpleasant experience.

The problem with the English Patient is that to enjoy it, you have to be either English or patient.

If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it's probably because at some level you find 'reality' a bit of a disappointment.

Reading is the way mankind delays the inevitable. Reading is the way we shake our fist at the sky. As long as we have these epic, improbable reading projects arrayed before us, we cannot breathe our last: Tell the Angel of Death to come back later; I haven't quite finished Villette.

Great writers say things that are so beautiful, the very act of repeating them makes life itself more beautiful.

I have never squandered an opportunity to read.