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.

If a book is really good, it deserves to be read again, and if it's great, it should be read at least three times.

In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives.

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.

Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.

There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.

Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.