It looks too new and pristine ever to have been read by anyone else, but it has been: it keeps falling open at the most delightful places as the ghos….

But I don't know, maybe it's just as well I never got there. I dreamed about it for so many years. I used to go to English movies just to look at the….

I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to "I hate to read new books," and….

I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest..

I find the treatment of royalty distinctly peculiar. The royal family lives in palaces heavily screened from prying eyes by fences, grounds, gates, g….

Did I tell you I finally found the perfect page-cutter? It's a pearl-handled fruit knife. My mother left me a dozen of them, I keep one in the pencil….

I wish you hadn't been so over-courteous about putting the inscription on a card instead of on the flyleaf. It's the bookseller coming out in you all….

I'll have mine [The Book-Lovers' Anthology] till the day I die - and die happy in the knowledge that I'm leaving it behind for someone else to love. ….

My problem is that while other people are reading fifty books I'm reading one book fifty times. I only stop when at the bottom of page 20, say, I rea….

If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much..

Talent is the infinite capacity for taking pains. Genius is the infinite capacity for achievement without taking any pains at all..

I have these guilts about never having read Chaucer but I was talked out of learning Early Anglo-Saxon / Middle English by a friend who had to take i….

I wanted to see London the way old people want to see home before they die..

I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone ….

I personally can't think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book..

Fact One: Cataract surgery is simple, painless and (except with implants) risk free ... the whole procedure is common, routine and nothing to worry a….

History, as they say, is alive and well and living in London..

I liked reading about the nun who ate so dainty with her fingers she never dripped any grease on herself. I've never been able to make that claim and….

I never overcame my conviction that writing for commercial television was a kind of prostitution..

What fortune teller would ever have had the nerve to predict that the best years of my life would turn out to be my old age?.

And for at least that moment, I wouldn't have traded the hundreds of books I've read for the few I know almost by heart..