Hollywood isn't a place, it's a way of life.

Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and was suddenly at peace.

I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.

If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much.

Why is it that people who wouldn't dream of stealing anything else think it's perfectly all right to steal books?

And for at least that moment, I wouldn't have traded the hundreds of books I've read for the few I know almost by heart.

I wanted to see London the way old people want to see home before they die.

History, as they say, is alive and well and living in London.

Talent is the infinite capacity for taking pains. Genius is the infinite capacity for achievement without taking any pains at all.

It's against my principles to buy a book I haven't read, it's like buying a dress you haven't tried on.

I liked reading about the nun who ate so dainty with her fingers she never dripped any grease on herself. I've never been able to make that claim and I use a fork.

In jealousy there is more of self-love than love.

More diets start in dress shops than in doctors' offices.

What are the "ifs" and "buts" that limit my enjoyment of life?

That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.

My mother converted to Catholicism to marry my father.

If my music doesn't fit, I understand, ... If I'm to play my music, that's the way it's gonna be.

The surest way not to fail is to determine to succeed.

I'm nervous... but I'm not going to fear what I'm about to do, I'm going to take it head on and I'm going to conquer it.

To say that we have a clear conscience is to utter a solecism; had we never sinned we should have had no conscience. Were defeat unknown, neither would victory be celebrated by songs of triumph.

Great offices will have great talents.