Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?

Fiction basically is a form of gossip where you want to enter other people's lives, the lives of people you don't know, and you want to know what's going to happen to them.

I think goodness is about how person behaves to person, and also person to world, to nature.

I don't pick and choose subjects or settings; they pick and choose me.

Dear though the reader might be, I'd be silly to cater to what the reader wanted.

Put your backbone where your wishbone is.

But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch.