I won't go so far as to say that novels sell in inverse proportion to their worth, for just occasionally, someone like Dickens or George Eliot comes along to prove the opposite.

You don't remember people you love by the wise things they say but the silly things they do.

'Great Expectations', in short, is a more damning account of the mess Dickens himself had made of love than any denunciation on behalf of the outraged wives club could ever be.

Reading literature remains a civilising activity, no matter that it's literature in which people do and say abominable things and the author curses like the very devil. What's at issue is how we describe the way the civilising works.

My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.

Does anyone who leaves a Baltic country ever want to return to it? Someone must, I suppose.