Barchester Towers has become one of those novels which do not die quite at once, which live and are read for perhaps a quarter of a century.

An author must be nothing if he do not love truth; a barrister must be nothing if he do.

When the ivy has found its tower, when the delicate creeper has found its strong wall, we know how the parasite plants grow and prosper.

Never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. People will take you very much at your own reckoning.

Fame is a skittish jade, more fickle even than Fortune, and apt to shy, and bolt, and plunge away on very trifling causes.

What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?...Was ever anything so civil?

The habit of reading is the only one I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade.

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

It has now become the doctrine of a large clan of politicians that political honesty is unnecessary, slow, subversive of a man's interests, and incompatible with quick onward movement.

There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art.

Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.

Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.

Not a word had dropped from my lips, or from hers, that could unsettle either of us—and yet the same unacknowledged sense of embarrassment made us shrink alike from meeting one another alone

A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years.

Scripture is something God had ‘let be,’ and so it is at once God’s creation and the creation of the dozens of people and communities and cultures who produced it.

I don't want to see a 'Sopranos' movie. This is just me. I like to think the end is where it was on TV as opposed to becoming a movie.

The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.

It all starts with a great idea and teamwork.

Guilty she might be. But what human being was not? There were things in her past she needn't be ashamed of, things to be proud of; she wouldn't surrender so meekly to a condemning judgment.

There's nothing glamorous about being dead.

I'm an eternal optimist with a small degree of cynicism.