I don't find myself interesting as a person and the details I find boring, quite frankly. You could sum it up in a few words or sentences really: came from nothing. Self-educated. Luck. Energy. Curiosity. Ambition. That's it. Nothing at all can illuminate the work as far as I can tell.

Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.

There are certain people who seem doomed to buy certain houses. The house expects them. It waits for them.

The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.

I had to paraphrase the paraphrase.

I have liv'd long enough for others, like the Dog in the Wheel, and it is now the Season to begin for myself: I cannot change that Thing call'd Time, but I can alter its Posture and, as Boys do turn a looking-glass against the Sunne, so I will dazzle you all.

To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning in life, and that there are limits to human understanding.