Politeness. Now there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them.

What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?

To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see.

I am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events. - Vida Winter

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.

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 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