He introduced around 600 words in Hamlet that he had never used before, two-thirds of which he would never use again

The roughly 4,000 lines in the play [Hamlet] ended up requiring nearly the same number of different words (for comparison’s sake, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta each use only about half that number). Even the 14,000 or so different words or compounds that Shakespeare had already employed in his plays (by the end of his career that figure would reach about 18,000) proved insufficient. According to Alfred Hart, who painstakingly counted when and how Shakespeare introduced each word into his work, he introduced around 600 words in Hamlet that he had never used before, two-thirds of which he would never use again. This is an extraordinary number (King Lear, with 350, is the only one that comes close; in the spare Julius Caesar only seventy words appear that Shakespeare had not previously used).

J. Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), 320

When I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not much care, how it is to end.

This is a long way from saying plausibly that Trollope is to any extent a crime novelist. He did write at least one murder mystery, Phineas Redux, although it's only a murder mystery for the extent of 24 pages in my edition before Trollope the narrator reveals the identity of the killer. "The maintenance of any doubt on that matter, - were it even desirable to maintain a doubt, - would be altogether beyond the power of the present writer," says Trollope, and you can't help feeling he's silently adding "and beneath my dignity".

...

Trollope couldn't abide this sort of thing [detailing clueing in detective novels], as he made clear elsewhere in his Autobiography. 

... When I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not much care, how it is to end. Wilkie Collins seems so to construct his that he not only, before writing, plans everything on, down to the minutest detail, from the beginning to the end; but then plots it all back again, to see that there is no piece of necessary dove-tailing that does not dove-tail with absolute accuracy. The construction is most minute and most wonderful. But I can never lose the taste of the construction.

J. Kerridge, ' "Fifteen yards beyond the fourth milestone." Anthony Trollope: crime writer', Trollopiana 130 (2025), 5-6

It is so tightly packed, so indistinguishable, so angular, that it makes your brain have a fight with your eyes

No one reads full Gothic script for a visual treat. It is so tightly packed, so indistinguishable, so angular, that it makes your brain have a fight with your eyes. It might look neatly ordered and crisp from a distance, bur once you start trying to read the actual words, it stops being pleasant… Scribes were well aware of how ridiculous this tightly compressed Gothic text looked, and they had a mock sentence that was mainly composed of the letters m, n, u and i [where the letters all run into each other so it is impossible to tell which is which]

S. Charles, The medieval scriptorium (2024), 281,283

The Huxleys are remembered as a scientific dynasty, but they are at least as significant as a literary family.

The Huxleys are remembered as a scientific dynasty, but they are at least as significant as a literary family. They wrote in multiple genres and for different audiences, in private and public. That the Arnolds grafted onto the Huxleys in the middle generation, meant that this became a conjoined highly regarded literary figures – Matthew Arnold, Aldous Huxley, Mary Augusta Ward – and of essayists, memoirists and science writers - Thomas Henry, Leonard and Julian. More privately, though still intermittently in published form, all of the Huxleys were poets. This was a family of professional wordsmiths.

A. Bashford, An intimate history of evolution (2022), 30

The youngest sibling of a whole family of writing tools that arrived in a flurry in the few decades either side of the beginning of the thirteenth century

The index, after all, did not arrive alone, but is rather the youngest sibling of a whole family of writing tools that arrived in a flurry in the few decades either side of the beginning of the thirteenth century. And all have one thing in common: they are all designed to streamline the reading process, to bring a new efficiency to the way we use books.

D. Duncan, Index, a history of the (2021), 56

The moral test with which Wodehouse was confronted in June 1941 was one that was beyond him

The moral test with which Wodehouse was confronted in June 1941 was one that was beyond him. In addition to his upbringing, there was his temperamental preference for finding the easiest way out of a tricky situation – and his obsessive commitment to his writing. It is these two factors that colour his actions with the taint of irresponsibility. Combined with his failure to understand the nature of Nazism, they proved fatal to his reputation.

R. McCrum, Wodehouse: a life (2004), 305

They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved

It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved; they do not understand that what interests you is the way in which you have created the illusion. Anthony Trollope ceased to be read for thirty years because he confessed that he wrote at regular hours and took care to get the best price he could for his work.

W. S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 77-8

How would a writer set about the massive task of giving a female character no consciousness

How would a writer set about the massive task of giving a female character no consciousness, not even an unconscious life, as if that were the most normal thing in the world? Perhaps it was normal in his world. And yet it takes a lot of work to construct any sort of character in fiction.

D. Levy, Real Estate (2021), 17

A foreign language can signify a total separation. It can represent, even today, the ferocity of our ignorance.

And yet this Italian project of mine makes me acutely aware of the immense distances between languages. A foreign language can signify a total separation. It can represent, even today, the ferocity of our ignorance. To write in a new language, to penetrate its heart, no technology helps. You can't accelerate the process, you can't abbreviate it. The pace is slow, hesitant, there are no shortcuts. The better I understand the language, the more confusing it is. The closer I get, the farther away. Even today the disconnect between me and Italian remains insuperable. It's taken almost half my life to advance barely a few steps. Just to get this far. 

J. Lahiri, In other words (2014) 91

Nowadays most long novels are bad

Besides, nowadays most long novels are bad. It was different a hundred or two hundred years ago. Today life moves faster, its parts are less connected; one assumes of most interesting events and relations (however intense) that they will be of no greater length or complication than can be described in twenty or thirty pages.

A. Lurie, Real People (1969), Collected edition (1999), 375