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I purposefully abstain from dates on this occasion, that very one may be liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people. I only entreat every body to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and become anxious to marry Fanny, as Fanny herself could desire.

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I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ( "I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority).
Preface.

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Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.

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Lord Byron, who was writing the third canto of Childe Harold, was the only one among us who put his thoughts upon paper. These, as he brought them successively to us, clothed in all the light and harmony of poetry, seemed to stamp as divine the glories of heaven and earth, whose influences we partook with him.

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Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.

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The great British Library: an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read: one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or pure English, undefiled wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought.

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I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.

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I don't think you can write a book that's worth anything without extraordinary discipline.

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You hear all this whining going on, "Where are our great writers?" The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?

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No translation our own country ever yet produced hath come up to that of the Old and New Testament; and I am persuaded that the translators of the Bible were masters of an English style much fitter for that work than any we see in our present writings; the which is owing to the simplicity that runs through the whole.