Librarying is a harder profession than the public realizes, he said. People think it's all rubber stamps, knowing that Dewey 521 is celestial mechanics and saying 'Try looking under fiction' sixty eight times a day.

I work very much on the principle that anything created by mankind has mischief and error hardwired into its inception.

Words are like leaves,. . .like people really, fond of their own society.

Marriage is an honorable estate and should not be used simply as an excuse for legal intercourse.

...being written by someone who might not quite understand the subconscious nuance of the character leaves us in varying degrees of flatness.

Dead. Never been that before. Not even once.

Everything comes to an end. A good bottle of wine, a summer’s day, a long-running sitcom, one’s life, and eventually our species. The question for many of us is not that everything will come to an end but when. And can we do anything vaguely useful until it does?