Quote

Habits of literary composition are perfectly familiar to me. One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas. Immense privilege! I possess it. Do you?

Wilkie Collins

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wilkie Collins
Age: 65 †
Born: 1824
Born: January 8
Died: 1889
Died: September 23
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet Lawyer
Writer
London
England
William Collins
William Wilkie Collins
Privilege
Immense
Intellectual
Grand
Habit
Faculty
Ideas
Habits
Rarest
Men
Accomplishment
Arranging
Possess
Accomplishments
Perfectly
Composition
Familiar
Literary

More quotes by Wilkie Collins

Image
I have always maintained that the one important phenomenon presented by modern society is - the enormous prosperity of Fools.
Wilkie Collins
Image
Yes! the books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill! The only years of my life that I can look back on with something like pride... Early and late, through the long winter nights and the quiet summer days, I drank at the fountain of knowledge, and never wearied of the draught.
Wilkie Collins
Image
And earth was heaven a little the worse for wear. And heaven was earth, done up again to look like new.
Wilkie Collins
Image
I am a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man!
Wilkie Collins
Image
The best men are not consistent in good-- why should the worst men be consistent in evil.
Wilkie Collins
Image
The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.
Wilkie Collins
Image
Pedants, who have the least knowledge to be proud of, are impelled most by vanity.
Wilkie Collins
Image
Where is the woman who has ever really torn from her heart the image that has been once fixed in it by a true love? Books tell us that such unearthly creatures have existed - but what does our own experiences say in answer to books?
Wilkie Collins
Image
Any woman who is sure of her own wits, is a match, at any time, for a man who is not sure of his own temper.
Wilkie Collins
Image
Your tears come easy, when you're young, and beginning the world. Your tears come easy, when you're old, and leaving it. I burst out crying.
Wilkie Collins
Image
I sadly want a reform in the construction of children. Nature's only idea seems to be to make them machines for the production of incessant noise.
Wilkie Collins
Image
No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.
Wilkie Collins
Image
I am a citizen of the world, and I have met, in my time, with so many different sorts of virtue, that I am puzzled, in my old age, to say which is the right sort and which is the wrong.
Wilkie Collins
Image
The fool's crime is the crime that is found out and the wise man's crime is the crime that is not found out.
Wilkie Collins
Image
It is the nature of truth to struggle to the light.
Wilkie Collins
Image
Except in this ignorant and material century, men have always worn precious stuffs and beautiful colours as well as women.
Wilkie Collins
Image
Is there any wilderness of sand in the deserts of Arabia, is there any prospect of desolation among the ruins of Palestine, which can rival the repelling effect on the eye, and the depressing influence on the mind, of an English country town in the first stage of its existence, and in the transition state of its prosperity?
Wilkie Collins
Image
I am not against hasty marriages where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.
Wilkie Collins
Image
The law will argue any thing, with any body who will pay the law for the use of its brains and its time.
Wilkie Collins
Image
I haven't much time to be fond of anything. But when I have a moment's fondness to bestow, most times the roses get it.
Wilkie Collins