When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.

Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one's own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live. There is in men, as Peter Quennell said, "a centrifugal tendency." In our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.

A bookcase is as good as a view, as much of a panorama as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms and zephyrs.

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.

We don't simply read books. We become them.