Great Throughts Treasury

"An idyllic childhood is probably illusion."

"We don't know who we are until we see what we can do."

"Before you hate something you should try to understand it."

"And so it continued all day, wynde after wynde, from a room beyond came the whistle of a teakettle. Now, you really must join me. I've some marvelous Darjeeling, and some delicious petits fours a friend of mine gave me for Christmas."

"Elf made his way fuzzily back to the drawer, trying to think nasty thoughts about his tormentor (Mungo the dog) but he couldn't, as he was too little and his mind was formless and without messages."

"Polly was a writer of many deadlines. There were the ignorable deadlines, the not-to-be-taken-too-seriously deadlines: the deadlines-before-the-deadlines deadlines, and finally, the no-kidding-around deadlines. She set these various dates, she'd told him, to fool herself."

"If a cone had dropped on velvet needles, if a star had lain a silver track across the sky, if the dead had turned in their graves - I swear, I would have heard it, that's how silent it all was."

"If there was one book that did not cry out for a sequel, it was Death of a Doge. Don't you remember what an awful time you had writing that book?"

"Remember the great film with Bette Davis, All About Eve? There's a scene after the scheming Eve steals Margo's role through trickery & then gets this magnificent review. Margo of course is effing & blinding all over the place. And crying. Her director rushes into her house, puts his arms around her & says, I ran all the way. That's what I want."

"What does the absolutely final deadline apply to? What book?"