In this cruel world kindness should always be repaid.

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

One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.

But there can be no secrets in a house where there are children.

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.

What better place to kill time than a library?

My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don't expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.