On the Road, Hence a Quote

Reading is a pleasure of the mind, which means that it is a little like a sport; your eagerness and knowledge and quickness count for something. The fun of reading is not that something is told you, but that you stretch your mind. Your own imagination works along with the author's or even goes beyond his. Your experience, compared with his, yields the same or different conclusions, and your ideas develop as you understand him. -- Bennett Cerf

As quoted in The Reader's Quotation Book: A Literary Companion.
Edited by Steven Gilbar, Introduction by Doris Grumbach
1990, Pushcart Press, New York