Criticism should be a casual conversation.

There is a great deal of difference in believing something still, and believing it again.

We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.

You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.

I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.

And none will hear the postman’s knock Without a quickening of the heart. For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.