Melisende

“I would say that fiction is something you write in spite of the research that you’ve done, not because the research you’ve done.”
― James Meek

“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

“I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

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