I shall sprinkle pale pencil marks through it pointing out the best passages to some booklover yet unborn.

I’m always ashamed when I discover how well-read other people are and how ignorant I am in comparison. If you saw the long list of famous books and authors I’ve never read you wouldn’t believe it. My problem is that while other people are reading fifty books I’m reading one book fifty times. I only stop when at the bottom of the page 20, say, I realize I can recite page 21 and 22 from memory. Then I put the book away for a few years.

Anything he liked, I’ll like. Except if it’s fiction. I never can get interested in things that didn’t happen to people who never lived.

I just threw out a book somebody gave me, it was some slob’s version of what it was like to live in the time of Oliver Cromwell – only the slob didn’t LIVE in the time of Oliver Cromwell so how the hell does he know what it was like? Anybody wants to know what it was like to live in the time of Oliver Cromwell can slop on the sofa with Milton on his pro side and Walton on his con, and they’ll not only tell him what it was like, they’ll take him there.

I houseclean my books every spring and throw out those I’m never going to read again like I throw out clothes I’m never going to wear again.

I never overcame my conviction that writing for commercial television was a kind of prostitution.

I’ve been sitting on the edge of the bed for an hour in a complete daze. I told him if I die toight I’ll die happy, it’s all here, everything’s here.

All my scripts have artistic backgrounds – ballet, concert hall, opera – and all the suspects and corpses are cultured, maybe I’ll do one about the rare book business in your honor, do you want to be the murderer or the corpse?

All that gleaming leather and gold stamping and beautiful type belongs in the pine-panelled library of an English country home; it wants to be read by the fire in a gentleman’s leather easy chair – not on a secondhand studio couch in a one-room hovel in a broken-down brownstone front.

But I don’t know, maybe it’s just as well I never got there. I dreamed about it for so many years. I used to go to English movies just to look at the streets. I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for. I said I’d go looking for the England of English Literature, and he nodded and said: “It’s there.