Happy the man...with a natural gift

for practising the right one [art] from the start — poetry, say, or fishing; whose nights are dreamless;
whose deep-sunk panoramas rise and pass

like daylight through the rod's eye or the nib's eye.

The gift of reading, as I have called it, is not very common, nor very generally understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment - a free grace, I find I must call it - by which a man rises to understand that he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he differs absolutely wrong.

Obviously the most beautiful fate, the most wonderful good fortune that can happen to any human being, is to be paid for doing that which he passionately loves to do.

She was a lucky woman who had established a happy knack of writing what quite a lot of people wanted to read.

It is noble to write as one thinks; this is the privilege of humanity.

Those whose work and pleasure are one... are... Fortune's favoured children.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

a love for good books was one of the best safeguards a man could have,

Riches are in fortune A greater good than wisdom is in nature.

A great writer is the friend and benefactor of his readers.

A taste for literature and a turn for business, united in the same person, never fails to make a great man.

Writing is an extreme privilege but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a gift of giving a story to someone.

Good fortune opens the hand as well as the heart wonderfully; and to give somewhat when we have largely received, but to afford a vent to the unusual ebullition of the sensations.

We men are built like that, and it is very fortunate that the imagination lends so much poetry to the senses, and that the desires of the body make thus much concession to the dreams of the soul.