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

All it takes is one teacher - just one - to save us from ourselves and make us forget all the others.

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

Once a book falls into our possession, it is ours, the same way children lay their claim: 'That's my book.' As if it were organically part of them. That must be why we have so much trouble returning borrowed books. It's not exactly theft (of course not, we're not thieves, what are you implying?); it's simply a slippage in ownership or, better still, a transfer of substance. That which belonged to someone else becomes mine when I look at it. And if I like what I read, naturally I'll have difficulty giving it back.

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

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