Why is it that people who wouldn't dream of stealing anything else think it's perfectly all right to steal books?

And for at least that moment, I wouldn't have traded the hundreds of books I've read for the few I know almost by heart.

It's against my principles to buy a book I haven't read, it's like buying a dress you haven't tried on.

I never overcame my conviction that writing for commercial television was a kind of prostitution.

I find the treatment of royalty distinctly peculiar. The royal family lives in palaces heavily screened from prying eyes by fences, grounds, gates, guards, all designed to ensure the family absolute privacy. And every newspaper in London carried headlines announcing PRINCESS ANNE HAS OVARIAN CYST REMOVED. I mean you're a young girl reared in heavily guarded seclusion and every beer drinker in every pub knows the precise state of your ovaries.

Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and was suddenly at peace.

I have these guilts about never having read Chaucer but I was talked out of learning Early Anglo-Saxon / Middle English by a friend who had to take it for her Ph.D. They told her to write an essay in Early Anglo-Saxon on any-subject-of-her-own-choosing. “Which is all very well,” she said bitterly, “but the only essay subject you can find enough Early Anglo-Saxon words for is ‘How to Slaughter a Thousand Men in a Mead Hall’.