[John McPhee] has taught writing at Princeton for decades. He tells his classes, "Taking things from one source is plagiarism; taking things from several sources is research.

I know that any book, when read at the right moment, might make my life better, might give me a greater understanding of the universe and all the other people in it.

As Neil Gaiman said, a book is a "little empathy machine," and it is "very hard to hate people of a certain kind when you've just read a book of one of those people".