Lists are a form of power.

When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.

Where would we be without inhibitions? Theyre quite useful things when you look at some of the things humans do if they lose them.

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending – sweet or sour – and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable?

I don't see much point in doing things for a pure joke. Every now and then you need a joke, but not so much as the people who spend all their lives constructing joke palaces think you do.