Closets Quote by John Updike

Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses.

— John Updike

Even Dickens, who did write about servants, made them almost cartoonish, so we concentrated on them, and we had various scenarios, synopses, and then…

— Jean Marsh

The house I grew up in was a tall Victorian town house in Bristol. There were very big rooms, which were under-furnished and always…

— Philippa Gregory

“The house squatted around them, vast, empty, unnecessary and indestructible. You had to be a fat busy Victorian family to expand enough to fill…

— Penelope Lively

In these old houses, I mean, we're here in the 17th century part of the palace and I can really belt out a tune…

— Princess Michael of Kent

It was an old fashioned house --the sort of house in fact, as Strange expressed it, which a lady in a novel might like…

— Susanna Clarke

“The house was a vast labyrinth of books. Volumes were stacked from floor to ceiling on every wall, dark, crackling, redolent of leather bindings,…

— Isabel Allende

“Then the house had been boldly planned with a ball-room, so that, instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it (as…

— Edith Wharton

My dwelling was small, and I could hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed larger for being a single apartment and remote…

— Anonymous

“I reveled in the smallness, the coziness of an upstairs bedroom in a traditional American Cape Cod house the half-floor that forces you to…

— Gary Shteyngart

A house should be a synthesis of comfort, practicality, and tradition.

— Elsie de Wolfe

Houses, like people, are apt to become rather eccentric if left too much on their own; this house was the architectural equivalent of an…

— Susanna Clarke