In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.

I am very grateful to the electronic world for making my life easier, but there is something about holding a book - the smell and the world of association. Even when e-books are perfected, as they surely will be, it will be like being in bed with a very well-made robot rather than a warm, soft, human being whom you love.

Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.

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.

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

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