One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.

Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.

It [Cambridge] wasn't a holy grail in the sense that I'd never been to Cambridge. But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.

If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.

A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.

So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.

History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.