Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don't understand.

Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.

Heaven lies around us in our infancy.

What kind of human person has a favorite eraser?

As soon as Oliver Twist is serialized, people who would never dream of reading [Charles] Dickens, if they hadn't seen him on their box, buy the paperback.

Put simply the novel stands between us and the hardening concept of statistical man. There is no other medium in which we can live for so long and so intimately with a character. That is the service a novel renders.

Serve you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry-babies!