The contents of someone’s bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
If a book is really good, it deserves to be read again, and if it’s great, it should be read at least three times.
It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn’t wait to leave.
Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one’s own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live. There is in men, as Peter Quennell said, “a centrifugal tendency.” In our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.
Either a writer doesn’t want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
A bookcase is as good as a view, as much of a panorama as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books – storms and zephyrs.
The tension between ‘yes’ and no’, between ‘I can’ and ‘I cannot,’ makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one’s self.
The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.
I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.
The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.