It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.
One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be.
[T]here is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing.
Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.
Books do furnish a room.
People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.