The best wines take the longest to mature.

Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.

I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.

Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.

His statement to himself should have been, 'I possess this now, therefore I am happy', instead of what it so Victorianly was: "I cannot possess this for ever, and therefore am sad."

We can sometimes recognize the looks of a century ago on a modern face; but never those of a century to come.

All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.