People see everything through the lens of their obsessions.

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.

I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.

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

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

What’s strange is how many beginning writers seem to think that grammar is irrelevant, or that they are somehow above or beyond this subject more fit for a schoolchild than the future author of great literature.