What we think we are surely going to do, we don't do; and what we never intended to do, we may one day notice that we have done, and done, and done.

Of comic novels that have quaffed the elixir of 'classic': Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm.

The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.

The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.

Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb.

Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such naive readers testifies to a failure of imagination - the capacity to see into unfamiliar lives, motives, feelings - and this failure must, at least in part, be the failure of the teaching of literature in the schools.

I'm not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called "scientific" mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.