The reader properly resents coincidence. Life does not arrange itself to suit him; why should it arrange itself to suit the author?
Reading
The dead alive and busy.
—Vaughan
No one wants realism in fiction — only a bit of reality tinsel to decorate the old myths.
Readers fall in love with villains because authors do.
Scholarship
Magisterial: Pompous
Brilliant: Unreliable
Valuable: Trivial
Eccentric: Deranged
Classic: Dull
Formidable: Duller
Encyclopedic: Stupefying
To read well you have to live a little.
The reader will often reject, when it is explained and argued for, what he would swallow if it were stated baldly and unadorned.
Write in the margin as you would speak to the author.
News is noise.
We say of indelible characters from life that they could be fictional; and from books, that they could be real.
In fiction we admire energy, not virtue. We root for the life-force, however it manifests.