Melisende

“Far and away the greatest menace to the writer—any writer, beginning or otherwise—is the reader. . . . The reader is, in fact, the writer’s only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction becomes meaningless. . . . It is, of course, the writer’s job to reach out and grab this reader: If he is a reader who cannot endure a love story, it is the writer’s job, no more and no less, to make him read a love story and like it. Using any device that might possibly work, the writer has to snare the reader’s attention and keep it.”
― Shirley Jackson

“rather split his trousers than an infinitive.”
― Len Deighton, The Harry Palmer Quartet

“The thing about somebody else's car was, it was automatically an all-terrain vehicle.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“No book has yet been written in praise of a woman who let her husband and children starve or suffer while she invented even the most useful things, or wrote books, or expressed herself in art, or evolved philosophic systems”
― Anna Garlin Spencer