Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.

In small towns, news travels at the speed of boredom.

I don't suppose you have many friends. Neither do I. I don't trust people who say they have a lot of friends. It's a sure sign that they don't really know anyone.

Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not the merits of who receives them.

A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.

In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

Childhood devotions make unfaithful and fickle lovers.