Surely we all occasionally buy books because of a daydream we're having - a little fantasy about the people we might turn into one day, when our lives are different, quieter, more introspective, and when all the urgent reading, whatever that might be, has been done. We never arrive at that point, needless to say.

It's not what you like but what you are like that's important.

It was hopeless, life, really. It was set up all wrong.

Sometimes we have to be judged by our one-offs.

The trouble with history is that there are too many people involved

Maybe the best thing to do with favorite books is to leave them be: to achieve such exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be recreated.

Record stores can't save your life. But they can give you a better one.