“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

The narrator opens his autobiography by declining to promise the reader any heroism at all, one of the great comic reversals in English fiction. The sentence has been quoted ever since by writers announcing that their own lives will not be made tidy, which is part of why the novel is still read as a book about writing as well as a book about a life.