The person the writer sees most of, most often, actually every day, is himself. When it comes to a question of why a man does something else, it’s the author’s own actions which make him understand, or fail to understand, the sources of human action.
“
| — | Fyodor Dostoevsky, quoted by Claire Tomalin in Charles Dickens: A Life, Viking, 2011. According to Deborah Friedell, in her review of this and two other biographies of Dickens, the quote may be spurious. The review is “His Friends Were Appalled,” London Review of Books, 5 January 2011, pages 30-31. |
