“I'm about to commence four years of obeying the cause of a bruiser on a horse. I refuse to put down what might be the last book I see for months.”

“Last night. I couldn't put that book down. I was awake till four this morning finishing it. I didn't know reading could be like that, I had no idea.”

“A man obtains his God-the-Preceptor at the age of twelve years and four months. At the age of twenty four years and eight months he gets and sees Atma, God, in the seventh plane. It takes twelve years and four months in the body for God’s manifestations and realizations in multifarious conditions in the process of transformation of life-power into God.”

“Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man’s solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude”

“Last month I was banging on about how books were better than anything—-how just about any decent book you picked would beat up anything else, any film or painting or piece of music, you cared to match it up with. Anyway, like most theories advanced in this column, it turned out to be utter rubbish. I went to a couple of terrific exhibitions at the Royal Academy (and that’s a hole in my argument right there—one book might beat up one painting, but what chance has one book, or even four books, got against the collected works of Guston and Vuillard?)...”

“If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse... but surely you will see the wildness!”