I even feel guilty if I'm reading a novel, because I think I should be reading Homer again. I don't really know what free time is, because I don't have something to measure it against.
If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
Written pages are something that can be returned to, reclaimed, and when they are marvelous, never lose their power.
In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern.
All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.
All great characters, great icons, in literature are a bit of a riddle, and that's the reason we go back to them over and over.
I cannot understate the ability to handle classical texts such as Shakespeare.
Taking trains and trams in Berlin, I noticed people reading. Books, I mean - not pocket-size devices that bleep as if censorious, on which even Shakespeare scans like a spreadsheet.
