| Quote | Author | Source | Email Quote |
|---|
| "Art," he continued, with a wave of the hand, "is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life." | W. Somerset Maugham | Of Human Bondage |  |
| "You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and art." | Benjamin Disraeli | Lothair | |
| ". . . there are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts." | Charles Dickens | Oliver Twist | |
| But Rosa soon made the discovery that Miss Twinkleton didn't read fairly. She cut the love-scenes, interpolated passages in praise of female celibacy, and was guilty of other glaring pious frauds. | Charles Dickens | The Mystery of Edwin Drood | |
| "Mr. Bazzard's father, being a Norfolk farmer, would have furiously laid about him with a flail, a pitch-fork, and every agricultural implement available for assaulting purposes, on the slightest hint of his son's having written a play." | Charles Dickens | The Mystery of Edwin Drood | |
| How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? Or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections? | George Eliot | Adam Bede | |
| What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left! | Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. | The Professor at the Breakfast Table | |
| . . . representatives of society and of art graciously mingled, since it is discovered that it is easier to make art fashionable than to make fashion artistic. | Charles Dudley Warner | The Golden House | |
| His experience at the publishers had taught him one important truth, and that is that a big subject does not make a big writer, that all that any mind can contribute to the general thought of the world in literature is what is in itself, and if there is nothing in himself it is vain for the writer to go far afield for a theme. | Charles Dudley Warner | That Fortune | |
| A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience. | O. Henry | Strictly Business | |
| "Art is not imitation, but illusion." | Charles Reade | Christie Johnstone | |
| What Art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern: the distinctive faculty. In the minds of men the useful has succeeded to the beautiful. | Benjamin Disraeli | Coningsby | |
| "To the man who loves art for its own sake," remarked Sherlock Holmes, tossing aside the advertisement sheet of the Daily Telegraph, "it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Adventure of the Copper Beeches | |
| "The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!" | Oscar Wilde | The Importance of Being Earnest | |
| Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance. | James Joyce | Ulysses | |
| "She dotes on poetry, sir. She adores it; I may say that her whole soul and mind are wound up, and entwined with it. She has produced some delightful pieces, herself, sir. You may have met with her `Ode to an Expiring Frog,' sir." | Charles Dickens | The Pickwick Papers | |
| "Life isn't long enough for love and art." | W. Somerset Maugham | The Moon and Sixpence | |
| "Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon." | George Bernard Shaw | Pygmalion | |
| Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself . . . | Samuel Butler | The Way of All Flesh | |
| There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art. | Anthony Trollope | Barchester Towers | |
