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.

It looks too new and pristine ever to have been read by anyone else, but it has been: it keeps falling open at the most delightful places as the ghost of its former owner points me to things I've never read before.

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 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’.

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

Talent is the infinite capacity for taking pains. Genius is the infinite capacity for achievement without taking any pains at all.

If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much.