If all power corrupts, then a doctor, who literally holds life and death in his hands, must be at particular risk.

You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?

Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.

It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all to soon, the very words "justice," "compassion," "society," "struggle," "evil," would be unheard echoes on an empty air.

It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.

Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.