Exquisite as an artistic product of Society, she affected the imagination not so much by her personal charm as through the perfume of luxury which br… - George Gissing

I maintain that we people of brains are justified in supplying the mob with the food it likes. We are not geniuses, and if we sit down in a spirit of long-eared gravity we shall produce only commonplace stuff. Let us use our wits to earn money, and make the best we can of our lives. If only I had the skill, I would produce novels out-trashing the trashiest that ever sold fifty thousand copies. But it needs skill, mind you; and to deny it is a gross error of the literary pedants. To please the vulgar you must, one way or another, incarnate the genius of vulgarity.

To flatter the proletariat is to fight against all the good that still characterises educated England — against reverence for the beautiful, against magnanimity, against enthusiasm of mind, heart, and soul.

The misery of having no time to read a thousand glorious books.