All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.

If things are going well I can easily spend twelve hours a day writing, but not writing writing, just thinking and revising and taking a comma out and putting it back in.

I remember, when I was a little kid, I was good at sports, and I could jump off the high board. And then puberty hit, and suddenly I was looking to boys for direction. I remember that as a great loss.

We never believe we're beautiful, no matter how many times we hear it. We never believe it until someone says it in the right way.

Words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.

You aim for what you want and if you don't get it, you don't get it, but if you don't aim, you don't get anything.

So perhaps the correct conclusion is that Green was less attuned to how people sound when they speak - the actual words and expressions they employ - than to what they mean. This notion of dialogue as a pure expression of character that...transcends the specifics of time and place may be partly why the conversations in the works of writers such as Austen and Bronte often sound fresh and astonishingly contemporary.