Revenge was a very wild kind of justice.

Almost everyone admits to hunger during the Opera.... Hunger is so exalting that during a last act you practically levitate.

Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one's own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.

Ghosts seem harder to please than we are; it is as though they haunted for haunting’s sake -- much as we relive, brood, and smoulder over our pasts.

In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant