Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.

How to read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.

We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.

The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.

One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.

Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness

Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden

Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, "tuned the English tongue.