from "My Debt to Books"

by Gertrude Stein

So many books have been important to me, it is like the man who said about automobiles when some one asked him is that mark a good one, all automobiles are good, some might go better than others but they all go, and that is the way books are to me, any book that I can read at all is important to me and I can read most of them, each one does something to me, you have to read a lot of books if you are going to read all your life and read at least five or six books a week, you can read them over and over again but even so it does take a good many if you begin when you are very young and you live a reasonably long life.