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

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

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.

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.

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

I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to "I hate to read new books," and I hollered "Comrade!" to whoever owned it before me.

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?