“I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was.”

“If God is an author and the universe is the biggest novel ever written, I may feel as if I'm the lead character in the story, but like every man and woman on Earth, I am a suporting player in one of billions of subplots. You know what happens to supporting players. Too often they are killed off in chapter 3, or in chapter 10, or in chapter 35. A supporting player always has to be looking over his shoulder.”

“Marriage is a book in which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.”

“In that book which is my memory,On the first page of the chapter that is the day when I first met you,Appear the words, ‘Here begins a new life’.”

“Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.”

“The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.”