“The faults of great authors are generally excellences carried to an excess.”

The first great requisite is absolute sincerity. Falsehood and disguise are miseries and misery-makers.

I would address an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati, grounded on my own experience. It will be but short; for the beginning, middle, and end converge to one charge: NEVER PURSUE LITERATURE AS A TRADE.

How inimitably graceful children are in general-before they learn to dance.

The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions – the little, soon forgotten charities of a kiss or a smile, a kind look or heartfelt compliment.

Friendship is a sheltering tree.

I have seen great intolerance shown in support of tolerance.

We are not of the same kind as beasts, and this also we say from our own consciousness. Therefore, methinks, it must be the possession of the soul within us that makes the difference.

Persecution is a very easy form of virtue.

In the deepest night of trouble and sorrow God gives us so much to be thankful for that we need never cease our singing.

There are errors which no wise man will treat with rudeness while there is a probability that they may be the refraction of some great truth still below the horizon.

This world has angels all too few, and heaven is overflowing.

The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity.

Summer has set in with its usual severity.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. For what is enthusiasm but the oblivion and swallowing-up of self in an object dearer than self?

All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.

The wise only possess ideas; the greater part of mankind are possessed by them.

I have no illusions concerning the precarious status of my tales and do not expect to become a serious competitor of my favorite weird authors.

Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?

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.