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.

A book is meant not only to be read, but to haunt you, to importune you like a lover or a parent, to be in your teeth like a piece of gristle.

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

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

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

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.