Helene Hanff

Hollywood isn't a place, it's a way of life.

— Helene Hanff

I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest.

— Helene Hanff

If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much.

— Helene Hanff

“Buying a book you've never read is like buying a dress you've never tried on”

— Helene Hanff

I wanted to see London the way old people want to see home before they die.

— Helene Hanff

History, as they say, is alive and well and living in London.

— Helene Hanff

“I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for.”

— Helene Hanff

Why is it that people who wouldn't dream of stealing anything else think it's perfectly all right to steal books?

— Helene Hanff

“i am going to bed. i will have nightmares involving huge monsters in academic robes carrying long bloody butcher knives labeled Excerpt,…

— Helene Hanff

What fortune teller would ever have had the nerve to predict that the best years of my life would turn out to…

— Helene Hanff

I liked reading about the nun who ate so dainty with her fingers she never dripped any grease on herself. I've never…

— Helene Hanff

Talent is the infinite capacity for taking pains. Genius is the infinite capacity for achievement without taking any pains at all.

— Helene Hanff

Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and was suddenly at peace.

— Helene Hanff

All my life I've wanted to see London. [...] I wanted to see London the way old people want to see home…

— Helene Hanff

It looks too new and pristine ever to have been read by anyone else, but it has been: it keeps falling open…

— Helene Hanff

“Somewhere along the way I came upon a mews with a small sign on the entrance gate addressed to the passing world.…

— Helene Hanff

My problem is that while other people are reading fifty books I'm reading one book fifty times. I only stop when at…

— Helene Hanff

“Have you got De Tocqueville's Journey to America? Somebody borrowed mine and never gave it back. Why is it that people who…

— Helene Hanff

Fact One: Cataract surgery is simple, painless and (except with implants) risk free ... the whole procedure is common, routine and nothing…

— Helene Hanff

I despair of ever getting it through anybody's head I am not interested in bookshops, I am interested in what's written in…

— Helene Hanff

I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading…

— Helene Hanff

“I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for.…

— Helene Hanff

I have these guilts about never having read Chaucer but I was talked out of learning Early Anglo-Saxon / Middle English by…

— Helene Hanff

I find the treatment of royalty distinctly peculiar. The royal family lives in palaces heavily screened from prying eyes by fences, grounds,…

— Helene Hanff

“I tell you, life is extraordinary. A few years ago I couldn’t write anything or sell anything, I’d passed the age where…

— Helene Hanff

But I don't know, maybe it's just as well I never got there. I dreamed about it for so many years. I…

— Helene Hanff

I wish you hadn't been so over-courteous about putting the inscription on a card instead of on the flyleaf. It's the bookseller…

— Helene Hanff

“Please write and tell me about London, I live for the day when I step off the boat-train and feel its dirty…

— Helene Hanff

“I don't browse in bookshops, I browse in libraries, where you can take a book home and read it, and if you…

— Helene Hanff

“I houseclean my books every spring and throw out those I'm never going to read again like I throw out clothes I'm…

— Helene Hanff

I personally can't think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book.

— Helene Hanff

It's against my principles to buy a book I haven't read, it's like buying a dress you haven't tried on.

— Helene Hanff

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

— Helene Hanff

And for at least that moment, I wouldn't have traded the hundreds of books I've read for the few I know almost…

— Helene Hanff

Did I tell you I finally found the perfect page-cutter? It's a pearl-handled fruit knife. My mother left me a dozen of…

— Helene Hanff

I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to…

— Helene Hanff

I'll have mine [The Book-Lovers' Anthology] till the day I die - and die happy in the knowledge that I'm leaving it…

— Helene Hanff