Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.

The human mind appears suddenly and inexplicably out of some unknown and unimaginable void. It passes half its known life in the mental chaos of sleep. Even when awake it is a victim of its own ill-adjustment, of disease, of age, of external suggestion, of nature's compulsions; it doubts its own sensations and trusts only in instruments and averages.

No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.

When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.

Act like you expect to get into the end zone.

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

They go in [to the library] not because they need any certain volume but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them.