I'd rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions.

When the Irish novelist John McGahern was a child, his sisters unlaced and removed one of his shoes while he was reading. He did not stir. They placed a straw hat on his head. No response. Only when they took away the wooden chair on which he was sitting did he, as he puts it, 'wake out of the book'.

It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.

You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.

when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says Private - grownups keep out: a children sprawled on the bed, reading.

Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.

E-mail is a modern Penny Post: the world is a single city with a single postal rate.