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

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

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'll have mine [The Book-Lovers' Anthology] till the day I die - and die happy in the knowledge that I'm leaving it behind for someone else to love. I shall sprinkle pale pencil marks through it pointing out the best passages to some book-lover yet unborn.

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

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.

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.)