Who said “Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that…”?

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”

“The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.”

“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”

“There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.”

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”

“The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.”

“Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.”

“Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial exercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test we can apply. We must forget the whole paraphernalia of social description, demonstration, expostulation, approbation, condemnation. We have to say to ourselves, ''How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?''”

“Consider a man riding a bicycle. Whoever he is, we can say three things about him. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. Most important of all, we know that if at any point between the beginning and the end of his journey he stops moving and does not get off the bicycle he will fall off it. That is a metaphor for the journey through life of any living thing, and I think of any society of living things.”

“Childhood is a disease -- a sickness that you grow out of.”

“Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.”