“They are gifted with the powers of being mothers, but not nursing mothers. Nature gives them bosoms for show, but not for use. So Lady Arabella had a wet-nurse.”

I run great risk of failing. It may be that I shall encounter ruin where I look for reputation and a career of honor.

Of all the needs a book has the chief need is that it be readable.

Travel with the same woman in a railway car for twelve hours, and you will have written her down in your own mind in quite other language than that of love.

I have sometimes thought that there is no being so venomous, so bloodthirsty as a professed philanthropist.

Taken altogether, Washington as a city is most unsatisfactory, and falls more grievously short of the thing attempted than any other of the great undertakings of which I have seen anything in the United States.

No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about himself.

What man thinks of changing himself so as to suit his wife? And yet men expect that women shall put on altogether new characters when they are married, and girls think that they can do so.

The happiest man is he, who being above the troubles which money brings, has his hands the fullest of work.

A man who would tell me that I am pretty, unless he is over seventy, ought to be kicked out of the room. But a man who can’t show me that he thinks me so without saying a word about it, is a lout.

There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

In these days a man is nobody unless his biography is kept so far posted up that it may be ready for the national breakfast-table on the morning after his demise.

If any such point out to us our follies, we at once claim those follies as the special evidence of our wisdom.

Men are cowards before women until they become tyrants.

Beware of creating tedium!

The circumstances seemed to be simple; but they who understood such matters declared that the duration of a trial depended a great deal more on the public interest felt in the matter than upon its own nature.

I am ready to obey as a child; :;but, not being a child, I think I ought to have a reason.

For me, a writer is already being the deuce of his mission, his occupation to society.

Our program is simple: we wish to govern Italy. They ask us for programs but there are already too many. It is not programs that are wanting for the salvation of Italy but men and will power.

You should be able to use the pieces you already own and add to them. Because they are like timeless classics.

I just talk about what’s going on, but of course, you know, Bob, before rappers, was already laying that kind of thing down.

Reinvent new combinations of what you already own. Improvise. Become more creative. Not because you have to, but because you want to. Evolution is the secret for the next step.

I am terrified and I don’t even know of what, because I have lost everything already.

You come first, the clothes later. Reinvent new combinations of what you already own. Be creative.

Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one’s reactions, answerable to no one’s views.