The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

Thackeray is everybody's past - is everybody's youth. Forgotten friends flit about the passages of dreamy colleges and unremembered clubs; we hear fragments of…

When you look at me, when you think of me, I am in paradise.

Next to excellence, comes the appreciation of it.

Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life.

The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

You advise me, too, not to stray far from the ground of experience, as I become weak when I enter the region of fiction; and you say, 'real experience is peren…