What I absorbed from autobiographies was not how to be great so much as the littleness of the great..

Men always say there is no female Shakespeare.' 'Humph! You study the fellows who say that, and you'll see they are a long way from being Shakespeare….

All is egotism. The only people whose mainspring is not egotism are the dead and perhaps idiots..

I'm sure it's not any wish of mine that I'm born with inclinations for better things. If I could be born again, and had the designing of myself, I'd ….