Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!)

The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose.

I don't want my books to exclude anyone, but if they have to, then I would rather they excluded the people who feel they are too smart for them!

There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while.

Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as mere consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.

Sometimes we have to be judged by our one-offs.

I don't even feel as if I'm the center of my own world, so how am I supposed to feel as though I'm the center of anyone else's?