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"But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do."
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"Villainessa Tittel was a hired killer, an assassin by trade. She had enjoyed the best education and had been trained by assassins who had (until then at least) been considered the best in the business. She had turned to 'cleaning' as an occupation because she really enjoyed endings more than beginnings " and anyway, she didn't need to know her mark's entire pedigree or life's story, or to have some kind of facetious moral justification just to collect her fee. Unsurprisingly, when she did read " on those rare occasions " her books were always dog-eared from the back."
"I got nice rejections explaining that historical fiction was a difficult sell. But I kept trying."
"But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel...it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended."
"In camp was found a book, the first of the kind I had ever seen, in which I was made a great hero, slaying Indians by the hundreds."
"For some, vampires are still firmly in the 'evil, scary' column. However, in recent decades, vampires also run the gamut from evil to morally ambiguous all the way to fangless and vegetarian. I think part of their appeal lies in their versatility. Vampires can be the villain, the hero, and everything in between, all depending on the writer's whim. You'll also never hear me say that anyone is doing vampires 'wrong' because unless a real vampire stands up and sets the record straight, it's anyone's game as a far as defining them in fiction."
Explore more quotes by George Saintsbury
"Between Scott on the earlier side and Dickens and Thackeray on the other, there was an immense production of novels, illustrated by not a few names which should rank high in the second class, while some would promote more than one of them to the first."
"The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story."
"But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time."
"The transition state of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: for this affected the process at both ends, giving the artist in fictitious life an uncertain model to copy and unstable materials to work in."
"The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet unfavourable for its growth."
"One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name."
"To pass to the deluge, and beyond it, and to come to close quarters with our proper division, the origin of Romance itself is a very debatable subject, or rather it is a subject which the wiser mind will hardly care to debate much."
"Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist."
"But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do."
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