Anthony Trollope

How seldom is it that theories stand the wear and tear of practice!

A man’s mind will very generally refuse to make itself up until it be driven and compelled by emergency.

The habit of reading is the only one I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will be there to support you when all other resources are gone. It will be present to you when the energies of your body have fallen away from you. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.

The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little—or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.

There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art.

Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.

Never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you very much at your own reckoning.

Those who have courage to love should have courage to suffer.

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

A man who thinks much of his words as he writes them will generally leave behind him work that smells of oil.

Beware of creating tedium! I know no guard against this so likely to be effective as the feeling of the writer himself. When once the sense that the thing is becoming long and has grown upon him, he may be sure that it will grow upon his readers.

Very much of a novelist’s work must appertain to the intercourse between young men and young women.

A novelist’s characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.