I Like To Imagine That,

If The Book Is Second-hand, I Leave All Its Markings Intact, The Spoor Of Previous Readers, Fellow-travellers Who Have Recorded Their Passage By Means Of Scribbled Comments, A Name On The Fly-leaf, A Bus Ticket To Mark A Certain Page.

Each Book Was A World Unto Itself, And In It I Took Refuge.

In No Way Am I Demeaning Writing Or Any Other Form Of Art Because It's Popular. What I'm Saying Is That Anything Fed Into The Industrial Machinery To Comply With Rules Of Size And Length And Shelf-life Has A Hard Time Surviving As Art.

Slothful, Feeble, Pretentious, Pedantic, Elitist - These Are Some Of The Epithets That Eventually Become Associated With The Absent Minded Scholar, The Poor Sighted Reader, The Book Worm, The Nerd.

I Had A Library Of Maybe 1,000 Books In My Room In Buenos Aires. I Did Have The Sense That Everything There Was Organised In The Right Way. You'll Probably Think I Needed Serious Psychiatric Treatment, But There Were Times When I Would Not Buy A Book Because I Knew It Wouldn't Fit One Of The Categories Into Which I Had Divided The Library.