‘[I]s there a named creature that makes pictures askew?’
— Michelle Farran

‘If you get a bargain it doesn’t argue back with you. It just, sort of, sits there and is nice to you.’
— Shirley Neale

‘The God of the underworld, Pluto, is Isodaitēs, the divider into equal portions.’
— Richard Seaford, Money and the Ancient Greek Mind

‘The smack of the waves on the shoreline sounded like a sheet of glass breaking.’
— June-Alison Gibbons, The Pepsi-Cola Addict

‘I am only infallible if I speak infallibly but I shall never do that, so I am not infallible.’
— John XXIII

‘[T]he balance has tilted towards writers who really love doing homework – they see the novel as homework, something you get a good star on.’
— Joanne McNeil, ‘what joanne is reading’

‘Every generation selects a favoured character-type based on a value. We live in an age that, in valorising “personal agency”, lays across the individual’s shoulders one of the heaviest double-binds a culture can construct: glad I wasn’t born into it.’
— M John Harrison, Wish I Was Here

‘Once and for all, stop eavesdropping on strangers talking about you in this crowded and filthy global toilet known as social media.’
— Naomi Klein, Doppelganger

‘In many cases, desire lies like a bodily boundary between the everyday and the unspeakable.’
— Samuel Delany, Shorter Views

‘It was as if daylight must never suspect the night habits of people.’
— Leo Madigan, Jackarandy