One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

The core – and perhaps unexpected – thing that books do for us is simplify. It sounds odd, because we think of literature as sophisticated. But there are powerful ways in which books organise, and clarify our concerns – and in this sense simplify.

Such intimate communion between our own life and the novels we read may be why Proust argued: "In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. the writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.

To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.Even the finest books deserve to be thrown aside.

How mean to buy only as many books as one will actually have time to read.

Academic masochism reflects a metaphysical prejudice that the truth should be a hard-won treasure, that what is read or learnt easily must therefore be flighty and inconsequential. The truth should be like a mount to be scaled, it is dangerous, obscure and demanding. Under the light of the library reading room, the academics' motto reads: the more a text makes me suffer, the truer it must be.