“There is probably no hell for authors in the next world – they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this.”

When all else is lost, the future still remains.

Courage enlarges, cowardice diminishes resources.

The most brilliant flashes of wit come from a clouded mind, as lightning leaps only from an obscure firmament.

Poverty is only contemptible when it is felt to be so. Doubtless the best way to make our poverty respectable is to seem never to feel it as an evil.

A woman’s love, like lichens upon a rock, will still grow where even charity can find no soil to nurture itself.

Something of a person’s character may be observed by how they smile. Some never smile they only grin.

The loveliest faces are to be seen by moonlight, when one sees half with the eye and half with the fancy.

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

The greatest happiness comes from the greatest activity.

Whether one talks well depends very much upon whom he has to talk to.

Few minds wear out; more rust out.

Heaven lent you a soul, Earth will lend a grave.

Within the sacred walls of libraries we find the best thoughts, the purest feelings, and the most exalted imaginings of our race.

Economy is for the poor; the rich may dispense with it.

Excellence in art is largely the result of attention to minutiae, and–prayer.

Truth, like the sun, submits to be obscured; but, like the sun, only for a time.

The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author’s life.

I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie.

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics.

The great ideas in science, like the Cro-Magnon paintings and the plays of Shakespeare, are part of our cultural heritage.

The thing I’d really like to see is the old London Bridge, with all the old buildings around it like Shakespeare’s Globe.

Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.

I think American actors are much more intimidated by Shakespeare.