There are times when the human face and body can express the yearning of the heart so accurately that you can, as they say, read them like a book. Do not abandon me.

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

A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.

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

Of course I loved books more than people.

Though my appetite for food grew frail, my hunger for books was constant.

Politeness. Now there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them.