“Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

“Intellectual 'work' is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legisl...”

“After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.”

“Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.”

“The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.”

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”

“Seriously, a thirty-something woman shouldn't be daydreaming about a fictional character in a two-hundred-year-old world to the point where it interfered with her very real and much more important ...”

“Allegra's Austen wrote about the impact of financial need on the intimate lives of women. If she'd worked in a bookstore, Allegra would have shelved Austen in the horror section.”

“Her [Mrs Croft's] manners were open, easy, and decided, like one who had no distrust of herself, and no doubts of what to do; without any approach to coarseness, however, or any want of good humour...”

“The pleasure of criticizing takes away from us the pleasure of being moved by some very fine things.”

“But instead of spending our lives running towards our dreams, we are often running away from a fear of failure or a fear of criticism.”

“The ugliest government is the one which is spreading fear to its own people! The finest government is the one which encourages its own people to criticize the government harshly.”

“Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's any less true.”

“Oh, Sweetie. No one ever gets through their TBR list. For every book you finish, you'll add five more. That's just the way it works.”

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”