I loved nearly all my teachers; but it was not till I went home to live at Oxford, in 1867, that I awoke intellectually to a hundred interests and influences that begin much earlier nowadays to affect any clever child.

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

A victim to certain obscure forms of gout, he was in character neither stupid, nor inhuman, but he suffered from the usual drawbacks of his class, - too much money, and too few ideas.

I regard the whole university system as a wretched sham. Knowledge! It has no more to do with knowledge than my boots.

So as the years draw on toward the Biblical limit, the inclination to look back, and to tell some sort of story of what one has seen, grows upon most of us.

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

There is nothing more startling in human relations that the strong emotion of weak people.