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.

I find the treatment of royalty distinctly peculiar. The royal family lives in palaces heavily screened from prying eyes by fences, grounds, gates, guards, all designed to ensure the family absolute privacy. And every newspaper in London carried headlines announcing PRINCESS ANNE HAS OVARIAN CYST REMOVED. I mean you're a young girl reared in heavily guarded seclusion and every beer drinker in every pub knows the precise state of your ovaries.

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

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 never overcame my conviction that writing for commercial television was a kind of prostitution.

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.