You can't have the family farm without the family.

A great deal of contemporary criticism reads to me like a man saying, 'Of course I do not like green cheese. I am very fond of brown sherry.

Whatever the word "great" means, Dickens was what it means.

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

Life is indeed terribly complicated—to a man who has lost his principles.

In the struggle for existence, it is only on those who hang on for ten minutes after all is hopeless, that hope begins to dawn.

By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.