I despair of ever getting it through anybody's head I am not interested in bookshops, I am interested in what's written in the books. I don't browse in bookshops, I browse in libraries, where you can take a book home and read it, and if you like it you go to a bookshop and buy it.

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.

What fortune teller would ever have had the nerve to predict that the best years of my life would turn out to be my old age?

I personally can't think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book.

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

History, as they say, is alive and well and living in London.

I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.