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.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Never write up your diary on the day itself, for it takes longer than that to know what happened.

Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim.

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.