To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see.

When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic, yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.

She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.

What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?

Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. it must be allowed to decay.

There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner.

Prescription: 'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, til end of course.