A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.

Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.

I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.

The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.

What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy

Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. it must be allowed to decay.