I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.

But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was.

[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.