""I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em. I ate 'em. And then...and then..." The Fire Chief's voice fades. Montag Prompts: "And then?" "Why, life happened to me." The Fire Chief shuts his eyes to remember."
— Ray Bradbury

""I'm not a drug salesman. I'm a writer."

"What makes you think a writer isn't a drug salesman?""
— Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle (Modern Critical Interpretations Series))

"I have heard it said that a complicated childhood can lead to a life in the arts. I tell you this story of my father and me to let you know I am qualified to be a comedian."
— Steve Martin (Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life)

""I didn't have a chance to buy you anything," she said, then held both closed hands toward him. Uncurled her fingers. In each cupped palm a brown egg. He took them. They were cold. He thought it a tender, wonderful thing to do. She had given him something, the eggs, after all, only a symbol, but they had come from her hands as a gift. To him. It didn't matter that he'd bought them himself at the supermarket the day before. He imagined she understood him, that she had to love him to know that it was the outstreched hands, the giving, that mattered."
— E. Annie Proulx

"If only my mother had a book to hold, she wouldn't have looked so lonely. And maybe this was another reason why people read: not so they would feel less lonely, but so that other people would think they looked less lonely with a book in their hands and therefore not pity them and leave them alone."
— Brock Clarke (An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England)