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.

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

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

The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles.

Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.

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

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.