The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.

There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers - there always were.

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning.

Paris is certainly one of the most boastful of cities, and you could argue that it has had a lot to boast about: at various times the European centre of power, of civilisation, of the arts, and (self-advertisingly, at least) of love.

His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he failed in the correct and acceptable fashion.