A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.

I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.

(On Charles Dickens) It has been the peculiarity and the marvel of this man’s power, that he has invested his puppets with a charm that has enabled him to dispense with human nature.

When I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not very much care, how it is to end.

When a man wants to write a book full of unassailable facts, he always goes to the British Museum.

The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little - or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.

This at least should be a rule through the letter-writing world: that no angry letter be posted till four-and-twenty hours will have elapsed since it was written.

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.