“Books have long been instruments of the divinatory arts. ”

“For life is short and the art of writing books is very, very long.”

“But art should require no instrument but memory.”

“Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.”

“Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.”

“Life is an art we are required to practice without preparation, a score that we play at sight even before we have mastered our instruments.”