"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


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


"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