I love the idea of exploring different worlds, whether it’s through reading or actually immersing myself in a new experience

What I have ever understood about a good letter is that it is the one to which the person can always hear with interest and engagement while the other person is just reading it out for the former one.

Reading is a journey of the mind

The act of reading is an act of empathy.

The creation is the Bible of the Deist. He there reads, in the handwriting of the Creator himself, the certainty of His existence and the immutability of His power, and all other Bibles and Testaments are to him forgeries.

The moral is perhaps that intellect and being well-read have no innate value to a contented or useful life. The number of hardbacks on your bedside table is in inverse proportion to the number of arched backs in your bed.

There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction.

How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.

Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.

A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.

I have practically no private life. I’m already used to this and ready for it. Yes, sometimes it is hard, but it is the choice I made.

I stay ready so I don’t have to get ready.

Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that’s real power.

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.