I jealously guard my research time and I love fully immersing myself in those dusty old books and papers. It’s one of the most enjoyable parts of my job.

Where books had been a comfort before, they became a necessity, old books best of all: thick heavy tomes with stories that spread and twisted through other worlds, where he could walk like a ghost...

It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.

Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.

You spend too much time on ephemeras. The majority of modern books are merely wavering reflections of the present. They disappear very quickly. You should read more old books. The classics. Goethe. What is merely...

Although she was a logical, practical person, she believed that in books there existed a kind of magic. Between the aging covers on these shelves, contained in tiny, abstract black marks on sheets of paper,...

Old books exert a strange fascination for me — their smell, their feel, their history; wondering who might have owned them, how they lived, what they felt.