Music is like poetry, It can stop you thinking. But it can also open you up.

People write for ego gratification, not money.

But in this case,” he continues, tracing the line of the plasterwork with one finger, “I feel that there is one cliché that sums up my position so admirably that it would be pure egotism to attempt a more interesting periphrasis. Plain speaking, therefore, there is to be.“There is undoubtedly a strong possibility, notwithstanding the vagaries of contingency and misfortune, that my son mighthave fallen—or might, we could say, have voluntarily jumped, in accordance with the ethical codes with which he has been brought up—for a play you have made with some success, although, as I am persuaded you would concede, very little originality.”Plain speaking if you’re Henry James, perhaps.

I look up at the ceiling, at all the hardcover fiction. So very few people want it. It is operating as insulation rather than stock. The argument rages on about whether it is better to have books or ebooks, but while everyone gets heated about the choices, the hardcover fiction molders quietly away.

Aristotle didn't have a problem with abortion," she says. "Oh, well, good, that's a comfort," I say.

It's a nebulous thing, but it is my belief—my experience also—that women do not have the need to collect that men have.

We're high on the adrenaline of feeling, even though we know it's fleeting and evanescence. And we're getting worse -- checking texts and emails and Facebook every five minutes, always searching for that next hit of feeling, that next morsel of approval.

You know, what I've always done is take a look through a book, look at the paper stock, the printing, the publisher, the actual content, and, taking everything into account, I price it. . . . And now I can't. The fact that I can check this book . . . — the fact that I can check this book on the Internet means that I have to check this book on the Internet.

It seems shelving is an art, like everything else. I decide to do it exceptionally well.

I think there is no difference between love and infatuation. If it works out, we call it love; if it doesn’t, we shrug our shoulders and say it was infatuation. It’s a hindsight word.

That thing that Hamlet says - "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so". Not quite true if you are stuck under a grand piano, not quite true for genocide, but surely it must be true about love?