Peter York Book Quotations

For me, wearing a tie is a pleasure, a recherche one but a pleasure nonetheless. You could say that I'm avoiding tie avoidance. My own gorgeous collection runs into hundreds and I buy them the way I buy books - I simply can't pass a shop. I have loved them since I could spend my own money on them.

When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn't know enough about things. They haven't been around enough - novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things - books like 'How To Run a Company' - I stopped reading novels.

The library was one more essential in the parade of rooms in a big 18th-century house - and part of the required kit ever afterwards. The important thing was to have the books, not actually read them.

Successive generations of middle-class parents used to foist their own favourite books on their children. But some time in the late Eighties it began to wane - not because children had lost interest in adorable animals but because most of it was available on useful, pacifying video.

Decorators never quite saw the point of massing books. Books brought colour to a room and filled it up, but shelves bearing just one thing struck them as a decorative display opportunity tragically lost.