In this choice, as I look back over more than half a century, I can only follow - and trust - the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction.

English girls' schools today providing the higher education are, so far as my knowledge goes, worthily representative of that astonishing rise in the intellectual standards of women which has taken place in the last half-century.

Every man is bound to leave a story better than he found it.

Place before your eyes two Precepts, and two only. One is, Preach the Gospel; and the other is--Put down enthusiasm!The Church of England in a nutshell.

For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures.

We enjoy the great prophets of literature most when we have not yet lived enough to realize all they tell us.

City of rest! - as it seems to our modern senses, - how is it possible that so busy, so pitiless and covetous a life as history shows us, should have gone to the making and the fashioning of Venice!