The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book.

Nothing succeeds, they say, like success. And certainly nothing fails like failure.

There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare.

I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.

Poverty, therefore, was comparative. One measured it by a sliding scale. One was always poor, in terms of those who were richer.

Nothing fails like failure

There are some people who cannot get onto a train without imagining that they are about to voyage into the significant unknown; as though the notion of movement were inseparably connected with the notion of discovery, as though each displacement of the body were a displacement of the soul.