A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a miserly wine lover. The social emotions it generates are equidistant from the philatelist's solitary gloating and the football fan's gregarious hysteria.

To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as a child and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key.

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

There is no reader so parochial as the one who reads none but this morning's books. Books are not rolls, to be devoured only when they are hot and fresh. A good book retains its interior heat and will warm a generation yet unborn.

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

If you want to feel at home, stay home.