... Rembrandt is not a painter at all. He is a creator, who creates his beings, three dimensional living beings, on a two-dimensional flat surface which acts as a mute, and enforces silence on them.

I wasn't educated. I was very lucky.

... possessiveness cannot accept; it cannot even strike a fair bargain; it has to confer.

Slowly, with a look of intense concentration, he got up and advanced on me ... put out a front paw, and stroked my cheek as I used to stoke his chops. A human caress from a cat. I felt very meagre and ill-educated that I could not purr.

You are only young once. At the time it seems endless, and is gone in a flash; and then for a very long time you are old.

about ten days ago I got started on a new book, and am completely, brazenly devoted to it: my hair is uncut, my letters are unwritten, the house is a shambles, and I sit here as happy as Mrs. Jellaby, though I am in 1836, not Africa. It won't go on like this, I shall fall over some obstacle, and wake out of my dreams with a black eye and broken shins: but while it does last, I daren't interrupt it. I haven't had such a spell of writing for nearly three years.

I wish I could write librettos for the rest of my life. It is the purest of human pleasures, a heavenly hermaphroditism of being both writer and musician. No wonder that selfish beast Wagner kept it all to himself.