Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for
the misery of being it.
When nothing is sure, everything is possible.
What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of it is. I find it just so staggering--that you're supposed to explain the meaning of your book to some total stranger! If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.”
Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die...
I need words and print... I need print like an addict. I could live without it, perhaps. But I hope I never have to try.
I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.
There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare.