Time, which despoils castles, enriches verses.

Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to forsee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details.

Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.

I believe books will never disappear. It is impossible for it to happen. Of all man's diverse tools, undoubtedly the most astounding are his books... If books were to disappear, history would disappear. So would man.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Mir Bahadur Ali is, as we have seen, incapable of evading the most vulgar of art's temptations: that of being a genius.

As a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight.