Publishers don't nurse you; they buy and sell you.

Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.

Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.

Publishers don't nurse you; they buy and sell you.

A politician is required to listen to humbug, talk humbug, condone humbug. The most we can hope for is that we don't actually believe it.

All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.

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.