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 wish you hadn't been so over-courteous about putting the inscription on a card instead of on the flyleaf. It's the bookseller coming out in you all, you were afraid you'd decrease its value. You would have increased it for the present owner. (And possibly for the future owner. 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.)

Hollywood isn't a place, it's a way of life.

But I don't know, maybe it's just as well I never got there. I dreamed about it for so many years. I used to go to English movies just to look at the streets. I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for. I said I'd go looking for the England of English Literature, and he nodded and said: "It's there.

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

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