Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.

Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.

Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.

No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.

Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives.

Old age makes caricatures of us all.

Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.