"You're drunk, and I'm drunk, and I'm just exactly drunk enough to tell you anything you want to know. That's the kind of girl I am. If I like a person, I'll tell them anything they want to know. Just ask me. Go ahead, ask me."
— Dashiell Hammett (Red Harvest)

"I like living in one room and have never known what people do with the room they are not in."
— Quentin Crisp (Resident Alien: The New York Diaries)

"A family of ten children will be always called a fine family, where there are heads and arms and legs enough for the number."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"A St. Trinian’s girl would be sadistic, cunning, dissolute, crooked, sordid, lacking morals of any sort and capable of any excess. She would also be well-spoken, even well-mannered and polite. Sardonic, witty and very amusing. She would be good company. In short: typically human and, despite everything, endearing."
— Ronald Searle (St. Trinian's: The Entire Appalling Business)

"There's not that much known, but there's a lot you can write about what's not known, why it isn't known and who doesn't know it."
— Richard Ellis

"Why, if there is anything in supply and demand, life is the cheapest thing in the world. There is only so much water, so much earth, so much air; but the life that is demanding to be born is limitless. Nature is a spendthrift. Look at the fish and their millions of eggs. For that matter, look at you and me. In our loins are the possibilities of millions of lives. Could we but find time and opportunity and utilize the last bit and every bit of the unborn life that is in us, we could become the fathers of nations and populate continents. Life? Bah! It has no value. Of cheap things it is the cheapest. Everywhere it goes begging. Nature spills it out with a lavish hand. Where there is room for one life, she sows a thousand lives, and it's life eats life till the strongest and most piggish life is left." "
— Jack London (The Sea Wolf)

"As for Women that do not think their own Safety worth their Thought, that impatient of their present State, resolve as they call it to take the first good Christian that comes, that run into Matrimony, as a Horse rushes into the Battle, I can say nothing to them, but this, that they are a Sort of Ladies that are to be pray'd for among the rest of distemper'd People..."
— Daniel Defoe (The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders)

"Youth is the only season for enjoyment, and the first twenty-five years of one's life are worth all the rest of the longest life of man, even though these be spent in penury and contempt, and the rest in possession of wealth, honors, respectability."
— George Borrow (The Romany Rye)

""I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.""
— Arthur Conan Doyle (The Complete Sherlock Holmes: All 4 Novels & 56 Short Stories)

"We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence."
— Charles Darwin (Origin of Species)