To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.

When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge; I take them like opium; and consider one who writes them as a sort of doctor of the mind.

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They repeat, they re-arrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a singular change-that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, nonce, struck out.

Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.

Everyone lives by selling something.

All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete.

The cruelest lies are often told in silence.