The power of vocabulary

He [CC Too Sweet, a prisoner] had no use for guns—these were for people who didn’t know how to use words. Or, to quote him, "I don’t need no Smith and Wesson, man, I got Merriam and Webster."

Avi Steinberg, Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (New York: Nan A. Talese, 2010), p. 306.

Pinker ♥ dictionaries

If I were allowed to take just one book to the proverbial desert island, it might be a dictionary. 

Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (New York: Viking, 2014), ch. 6

Pinker says read with a dictionary

Readers who want to become writers should read with a dictionary at hand (several are available as smartphone apps), and writers should not hesitate to send their readers there if the word is dead-on in meaning, evocative in sound, and not so obscure that the reader will never see it again.

Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (New York: Viking, 2014), ch. 1

Oliver Sacks ♥ the OED

Fifty pounds came with the Theodore Williams prize [in anatomy, at Oxford]—£50! I had never had so much money at once. This time I went not to the White Horse but to Blackwell's bookshop (next door to the pub) and bought, for £44, the twelve volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, for me the most coveted and desirable book in the world. I was to read the entire dictionary through when I went on to medical school, and I still like to take a volume off the shelf, now and then, for bedtime reading.

Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)

Dictionaries are fun!

The dictionary invites a playful reading. It challenges anyone to sit down with it in an idle moment only to find an hour gone by without being bored. 

Mortimer Adler, "How to Read a Dictionary" (1941), in Words, Words, Words About Dictionaries 53, 53 (Jack C. Gray ed., 1963). (From Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day)