“Over the years, my experience, my tastes, my prejudices have changed: as the days go by, my memory keeps reshelving, cataloguing, discarding the volumes in my library, my words and my world - except for a few constant landmarks - are never one and the same. Heraclitus’s bon mot about time applies equally well to my reading: “You never dip into the same book twice.”

“I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days.”

“It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge them necessarily reshapes my choice and, more important, in no time proves too small for them and forces me to change my arrangement. In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long. Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books.”

“In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world. ”

“I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books.”

“I enjoyed learning the poems, but I didn’t understand of what use they might possibly be. ‘They’ll keep you company on the day you have no books to read,’ my teacher said.”

“Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine.”