Might I trouble you to open the window, for chloroform vapour does not help the palate.

His incredible untidiness, his addiction to music at strange hours, his occasional revolver practice within doors, his weird and often malodorous scientific experiments, and the atmosphere of violence and danger which hung around him made him the very worst tenant in London.

Some people's affability is more deadly than the violence of coarser souls.

To underestimate oneself is as much an exaggeration of one's powers than the other.

It has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it and I have made some bad mistakes in consequence. What matter if I hold my readers?

Yet birth, and lust, and illness, and death are changeless things, and when one of these harsh facts springs out upon a man at some sudden turn of the path of life, it dashes off for the moment his mask of civilization and gives a glimpse of the stranger and stronger face below.

The unexpected has happened so continually in my life that it has ceased to deserve the name.