There is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.

Truth is the ricochet of a prejudice bouncing off a fact.

Any man worth his salt has by the time he is forty-five accumulated a crown of thorns, and the problem is to learn to wear it over one ear.

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

Continually one faces the horrible matter of making decisions. The solution is, as far as possible, to avoid conscious rational decisions and choices; simply to do what you find yourself doing; to float in the great current of life with as little friction as possible; to allow things to settle themselves, as indeed they do with the most infallible certainty.

Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives. Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world--the brains of men.

The unluckiest insolvent in the world is the man whose expenditure of speech is too great for his income of ideas.