What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?

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

There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.

My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.

Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.

All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy