Before the reader is introduced to the modest country medical practitioner who is to be the chief personage of the following tale, it will be well that he should be made acquainted with some particulars as to the locality in which, and the neighbours among whom, our doctor followed his profession.

The end of a novel, like the end of a children's dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plums.

One of her instructors in fashion had given her to understand that curls were not the thing. 'They'll always pass muster,' Miss Dunstable had replied, 'when th…

Don't let love interfere with your appetite. It never does with mine.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for m…

Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction.

In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.