[C.S.] Lewis was already acquiring the skill and taste to claim, one day, the mantle of twentieth-century heir to Samuel Johnson, the most widely read man in eighteenth-century England. To generations of students, astonished by his prodigious literary memory, he would give this simple counsel: “The great thing is to be always reading, but never to get bored – treat it not like work, more as a vice!”
From, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings by Philip and Carol Zaleski.