High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.

Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.

There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning and yearning.

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.

Happiness is surely the best teacher of good manners: only the unhappy are churlish in deportment.

There are certain people whom one feels almost inclined to urge to hurry up and die so that their letters can be published.

Friendships do not grow up in any carefully tended and contemplated fashion.... They begin haphazard.