Melisende

“If you cannot read all your books...fondle them---peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“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 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

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