Quote

I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.

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
Fiction
Opinion
Story
Fashioned
Tell
Primaries
Stories
Primary
Work
Held
Always
Object
Objects

More quotes by Wilkie Collins

Image
But, ah me! where is the faultless human creature who can persevere in a good resolution, without sometimes failing and falling back?
Wilkie Collins
Image
Well may your heart believe the truths Well may your heart believe the truths I tell 'Tis virtue makes the bliss, where'er we dwell.
Wilkie Collins
Image
If I ever meet with the man who fulfills my ideal, I shall make it a condition of the marriage settlement, that I am to have chocolate under the pillow.
Wilkie Collins
Image
What lurking temptations to forbidden tenderness find their finding-places in a woman's dressing-gown, when she is alone in her room at night!
Wilkie Collins
Image
Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.
Wilkie Collins
Image
This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.
Wilkie Collins
Image
Husbands and wives talk of the cares of matrimony, and bachelors and spinsters bear them.
Wilkie Collins
Image
It is one of my rules in life, never to notice what I don't understand.
Wilkie Collins
Image
My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.
Wilkie Collins
Image
No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.
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
I roused myself from the book which I was dreaming over rather than reading, and left my chambers to meet the cool night air in the suburbs.
Wilkie Collins
Image
...it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.
Wilkie Collins
Image
Let the music speak to us of tonight, in a happier language than our own.
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 horrid mystery hanging over us in this house gets into my head like liquor, and makes me wild.
Wilkie Collins
Image
I say what other people only think, and when all the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears off the plump pasteboard and shows the bare bones beneath.
Wilkie Collins
Image
The future of English fiction may rest with this Unknown Public - a reading public of three millions which lies right out of the pale of true literary civilization - which is now waiting to be taught the difference between a good book and a bad.
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
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