She wasn't the only one to be physically morphed by reader expectation. Miss Havisham was now elderly whether she liked it or not, and Sherlock Holmes wore a deerstalker and smoked a ridiculously large pipe. The problem wasn't just confined to the classics. Harry Potter was seriously pissed off that he'd have to spend the rest of life looking like Daniel Radcliffe.

Everything comes to an end. A good bottle of wine, a summer’s day, a long-running sitcom, one’s life, and eventually our species. The question for many of us is not that everything will come to an end but when. And can we do anything vaguely useful until it does?

The fun one can have writing books about books is limitless, to be honest.

...being written by someone who might not quite understand the subconscious nuance of the character leaves us in varying degrees of flatness.

Death and the end of one's life are two very different things indeed.

If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher.

I got Oedipus off the incest charge--technicality, of course--he didn't know it was his mother at the time.