Reading

Once I had learned to read my letters, I read everything: books, but also notices, advertisements, the small type on the back of tramway tickets, letters tossed into the garbage, weathered newspapers caught under my bench in the park, graffiti, the back covers of magazines held by other readers on the bus, When I found that Cervantes, in his fondness for reading, read "even the bits of paper in the street," I knew exactly what urge drove him to this scavenging. - Alberto Manguel