You know well I couldn't bear to live with a low common man after you two; and it's wicked and cruel of you to insult me by pretending I could.

People have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my notices as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic.

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

Fashions are the only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesmen.

It exasperated her to think that the dungeon in which she had languished for so many unhappy years had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping well with society, were precisely those by which alone she could have come into any sort of sincere human contact.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

I was always unlawful; I broke the law when I was born because my parents weren't married.