Time spent reading, like time spent loving, increases our lifetime.

By making time to read, like making time to love, we expand our time for living.

Each country thinks its school is in a specific crisis, without ever linking the school's crisis to that of the society around it.

The paradoxical virtue of reading lies in distancing ourselves from the world so that we may make sense of it.

I've never had time to read. But no one ever kept me from finishing a novel I loved.

But reading is different, reading is something you do. With TV, and cinema for that matter, everything's handed to you on a plate, nothing has to be worked at, they just spoon-feed you. The picture, the sound, the scenery, the atmospheric music in case you haven't understood what the director's on about... The creaking door that tells you to be stiff. You have to imagine it all when you're reading.

The teacher is commodified, the school is a shop, the subjects are consumer goods. To read, to think, to reflect, isn't a question of want, it's a question of need.