I have a notebook called, pretentiously no doubt, my ‘Commonplace Book.’ I took the title from E. M. Forster, the first writer – so far as I recall – whose book-length biography I read (the one by P. N. Furbank). Forster’s Commonplace Book was published, long after his death, by an American university press. I don’t expect mine to achieve such immortality, but I go back to it often. What I do in it is simple. I take quotations that have struck me in my reading, and copy them out by hand. Quotations may take in any subject that interests me, but more often than not the subject is literature. Here are thirty quotations I like. Do I really believe them all? Maybe not. But I find them interesting. Continue reading