His imagination was always more real than the reality of daily life.

Power: a currency that never went out of style.

The problem with being passionately in love ... is that it deprives you of too much sleep.

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.

Words are the light and sound of our existence, the heat lightning by which the night is illuminated.

Words were like objects, making the idea more solid -- less a poisonous gas and more a ... cube of crystallized thought.

Wilkie Collins was a rival and competitor of Dickens. His novel Moonstone sold more copies at the time than Dickens' last two books. But that meant nothing in the long run. Right now, to be honest, Wilkie Collins is what he deserved to be back then: a footnote, an almost lost memory. And he knew he would become that.