No good play is a success; fine writing and high morals are useless on the stage. I have been scribbling twaddle for thirty-five years to suit the public taste, and I should know.

I'm very good at integral and differential calculus, I know the scientific names of beings animalculous; In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral, I am the very model of a modern Major-General.

As is gloriously sung in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta "H.M.S. Pinafore," in the words of W. S. Gilbert: "Things are seldom as they seem, Skim milk masquerades as cream."

To sit in solemn silence on a dull, dark dock in a pestilential prison with a life-long lock awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock from a cheap and chippy chopper on a big, black block.

You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of complicated state of mind. The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.

If you're anxious to shine in the high aesthetic line as a man of culture rare, you must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant them everywhere.

I'm really very sorry for you all, but it's an unjust world, and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances.