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Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time.
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Love is a wonderful thing, my dear, but it leaves you wide open for blackmail.
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Fiction wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.
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A good butler should save his employer's life at least once a day.
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I also read about Heathcliff's unexpected three-year career in Hollywood under the name Buck Stallion and his eventual return to the pages of Wuthering Heights.
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The universe always moves from an ordered state to a disordered one; that a glass may fall to the ground and shatter yet you never see a broken glass reassemble itself and then jump back on the table.
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Yes, and imagine a world where there were no hypothetical situations.
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We all make mistakes at some time in our lives, some more than others. It is only when the cost is counted in human lives that people really take notice.
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Growth purely for its own sake is the philosophy of cancer.
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There is a certain degree of 'steampunkishness' that creeps into my books.
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Reality TV was to me the worst form of entertainment--the modern equivalent of paying sixpence to watch lunatics howling at the wall down at the local madhouse.
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History has rewritten itself so many times I'm not really sure how it was to begin with -- it's a bit like trying to guess the original color of a wall when it's been repainted eight times.
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Comedy was one of those genres that while appearing quite jolly was actually highly dangerous.
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Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world.
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The fun one can have writing books about books is limitless, to be honest.
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What is there to forgive?. . .Ignore forgive and concentrate on living. Life for you is short; far too short to allow small jealousies to infringe on the happiness which can be yours only for the briefest of times.
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Books" - Snell smiled - "are a kind of magic.
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That's the thing about destiny: It can't be predicted, and it's usually pretty odd.
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I've got six months to sort out the hackers, get the Japanese knotweed under control and find an acceptable form of narcissus.
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Love and magic are like oil and water – they just don't mix.
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I still feel threatened by academics, but my books have a lot of academic in-jokes and everybody assumes I went to university and studied English.
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I would so hate to be a first-person character! Always on your guard, always having people read your thoughts!
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Librarying is a harder profession than the public realizes, he said. People think it's all rubber stamps, knowing that Dewey 521 is celestial mechanics and saying 'Try looking under fiction' sixty eight times a day.
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People don't change just because you know more about them.