...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.

It is a truism of epistolary psychology that, for example, a Christmas thank-you note written on December 26 can say any old thing, but if you wait until February, you are convinced that nothing less than Middlemarch will do.

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

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

One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.

If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone

If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.