“I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.”

“Any story that’s going to be any good is usually going to change.”

On biographers: “James invited his future biographers to seek him out in what he called the ‘invulnerable granite’ of his art. That's so Jamesian—the ‘invulnerable granite.’”