...for literature had always been a solace for him, something that the ugliness of facts could not spoil.

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

The answer, he told me, was to be found in reading. Can it be that simple? It was books, he said, that made him a better man.

Reading remained Musk’s psychological retreat. Sometimes he would immerse himself in books all afternoon and most of the night, nine hours at a stretch.

His mind was indeed my library, and whenever it was opened to me, I entered bliss.

Reading nurtures the soul, and an enlightened friend brings it solace.

Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.

Sleep is good,” he said. “And books are better.

Some say they get lost in books, but I find myself, again and again, in the pages of a good book. Humanly speaking, there is no greater teacher, no greater therapist, no greater healer of the soul, than a well-stocked library.

His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind.

He loved books; books are cold but safe friends.

He began to read at haphazard. He entered upon each system with a little thrill of excitement, expecting to find in each some guide by which he could rule his conduct; he felt himself like a traveller in unknown countries and as he pushed forward the enterprise fascinated him; he read emotionally, as other men read pure literature, and his heart leaped as he discovered in noble words what himself had obscurely felt.

The book. Calming object. Held in the hand.

The living room is dark and low-ceilinged, with bookshelves all along the wall opposite the windows. These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It is just that he likes listening to their voices, the one or the other, according to his mood. He misuses them quite ruthlessly - despite the respectful way he has to talk about them in public - to put him to sleep, to take his mind off the hands of the clock, to relax the nagging of his pyloric spasm, to gossip him out of his melancholy, to trigger the conditioned reflexes of his colon.