Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Writing
Luxury
Years
Species
Time
Waste
People
Decided
Exertion
Novel
Utter
Dangerous
Lowest
Reading
Literary
Everyone
Dull
More quotes by Wilkie Collins
Pedants, who have the least knowledge to be proud of, are impelled most by vanity.
Wilkie Collins
Men little know when they say hard things to us how well we remember them, and how much harm they do us.
Wilkie Collins
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
The best men are not consistent in good-- why should the worst men be consistent in evil.
Wilkie Collins
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
The evening advanced. The shadows lengthened. The waters of the lake grew pitchy black. The gliding of the ghostly swans became rare and more rare.
Wilkie Collins
But, ah me! where is the faultless human creature who can persevere in a good resolution, without sometimes failing and falling back?
Wilkie Collins
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
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
My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.
Wilkie Collins
Let the music speak to us of tonight, in a happier language than our own.
Wilkie Collins
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
No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.
Wilkie Collins
I never paid you a compliment, Rachel, in my life. Successful love may sometimes use the language of flattery, I admit. But hopeless love, dearest, always speaks the truth.
Wilkie Collins
I have heard, as everybody else has, of a spirit's haunting a house but I have had my own personal experience of a house's haunting a spirit.
Wilkie Collins
I have noticed that the Christianity of a certain class of respectable people begins when they open their prayer-books at eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, and ends when they shut them up again at one o'clock on Sunday afternoon. Nothing so astonishes and insults Christians of this sort as reminding them of their Christianity on a week-day.
Wilkie Collins
There are three things that none of the young men of the present generation can do.They can't sit over their winethey can't play at wistand they can't pay a lady a compliment.
Wilkie Collins
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
It is one of my rules in life, never to notice what I don't understand.
Wilkie Collins
I used to attend scientific experiments when I was a girl at school. They invariably ended in an explosion. If Mr. Jennings will be so very kind, I should like to be warned of the explosion this time. With a view to getting it over, if possible, before I go to bed.
Wilkie Collins
