I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.

If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.

I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo.

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 has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.

For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.

When I write after dark", observed Cyril Connolly, "the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose