"The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there's not as much reflective time. And it's the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me."
— Joyce Carol Oates

"I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything."
— Steven Wright

"I wonder which is worse: to be ravished a hundred times by negro pirates, to have one buttock cut off, to run the gauntlet among the Bulgarians, to be dissected and to be a galley-slave; or to stay here doing nothing?"
— Voltaire (Candide, or Optimism)