"God knows that I would rather stand in the lowest place within the Truth, than in the highest without it. Nay, outside the Truth the higher the worse. It is only so much more opposition to Truth, so much more propagation of falsehood."

"No ignorance of truth is a personal sin before God, except that ignorance which springs from personal sin."

"As a dogma, theologians teach that many belong to the Church who are out of its visible unity; as a moral truth that to be out of the Church is no personal sin, except to those who sin in being out of it. That is, they will be lost, not because they are geographically out of it, but because they are culpably out of it."

"There are only two centres, God and ourselves; and we must rest on one or on the other."

"Imitable, Aubrey, imitable, surely."

"I see you have a feeling for draperies, and I suggest you cultivate it."

"Why, you don't know anything about editing. Neither of you, not even with me, can run a magazine."

"Superbly premature as the flowering of his genius was, still he had immense development, and had not sounded his last stop. There were great possibilities in the cavern of his soul, and there is something macabre and tragic in the fact that one who added another terror to life should have died at the age of a flower."

"He was shy, nervous, and self-conscious, without any of the intellectual assurance and ease so characteristic of him eighteen months later when his success was unquestioned."

"Oscar loved purple and gold, Aubrey put everything down in black and white. And while every connoisseur declared that line of the artist superb, there were others who deplored that he did not know where to draw it."

"The only place in London where one can forget that it is Sunday."

"When an Englishman has professed his belief in the supremacy of Shakespeare amongst all poets, he feels himself excused from the general study of literature. He also feels himself excused from the particular study of Shakespeare."

"One’s ears are weary of the voice of the art teacher who sits like the parrot on his perch, learning the jargon of the studios, making but poor copy and calling it criticism. We have had enough of their omniscience, their parade of technical knowledge, and their predilection for the wrong end of the stick."

"The poster first of all justified its existence on the grounds of utility, and should it further aspire to beauty of line and colour, may not our hoardings claim kinship with the galleries, and the designers of affiches pose proudly in the public eye as the masters of Holland Road or Bond Street Barbizon (and, recollect, no gate money, no catalogue)?"

"What view the bill-sticker and sandwich man take of the subject I have yet to learn. The first is, at least, no bad substitute for a hanging committee, and the clothes of the second are better company than somebody else’s picture, and less obtrusive than a background of stamped magenta paper."

"Advertisement is an absolute necessity of modern life, and if it can be made beautiful as well as obvious, so much the better for the makers of soap and the public who are likely to wash."

"Pope has more virulence and less vehemence than any of the great satirists. His character of Sporus is the perfection of satirical writing. The very sound of words scarify before the sense strikes."

"Of course, I have one aim, the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing."

"I have always done my sketches, as people would say, for the fun of it... I have worked to amuse myself, and if it has amused the public as well, so much the better for me."

"I think the title page I drew for Salomé was after all "impossible". You see booksellers couldn't stick it up in their windows."

"There was a young man with a salary, Who had to do drawings for Malory; When they asked him for more, He replied, 'Why? Sure You've enough as it is for a gallery.'"

"I shall not live much longer than did Keats."

"The general opinion appears to be that it is very funny to make yourself out as fast or as foolish as possible; though even worse than this is the painful orthodoxy of those individuals who claim Shakespeare for their favourite poet, Beethoven for their favourite composer, and Raphael for their favourite painter."

"How few of our young English impressionists knew the difference between a palette and a picture! However, I believe that Walter Sickert did — sly dog!"

"What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am." Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it."

"All humanity inspires me. Every passer-by is my unconscious sitter; and as strange as it may seem, I really draw folk as I see them. Surely it is not my fault that they fall into certain lines and angles."

"I see everything in a grotesque way. When I go to the theatre, for example, things shape themselves before my eyes just as a I draw them — the people on the stage, the footlights, the queer faces and garb of the audience in the boxes and stalls. They all seem weird and strange to me. Things have always impressed me in this way."

"It takes only one man to make an artist, but forty to make an Academician."

"I’m so affected, that even my lungs are affected."

"His sketches were numerous and so were his mistakes."

"Poets work upon and through each other."

"When I re-read my past work I can see a development to such an effect, indeed, that some of them no longer seem to be any part of me."

"It was a yellow voice, a high, shrill treble in the nursery White always and high, I remember it so, White cupboard, off-white table, mugs, dolls’ faces And I was four or five. The garden could have been Miles away. We were taken down to the green Asparagus beds, the cut lawn, and the smell of it Comes each summer after rain when white returns. Our bird, A canary called Peter, sang behind bars. The black and white cat Curled and snoozed by the fire and danger was far away."

"Dick Van Dyke was older than me and I was playing his dad."

"We grabbed their hands and dragged them home. Ah, I hope they’ve forgiven me."

"And have they fixed the where and when? And shall Trelawney die? Here's twenty thousand Cornish men Shall know the reason why!"

"Princess: I am always disappointed with mountains. There are no mountains in the world as high as I could wish. Adrian: No? Princess: They irritate me invariably. I should like to shake Switzerland."

"Oh! help me, heaven," she prayed, "to be decorative and to do right!"

"I remember the average curate at home as something between a eunuch and a snigger."

"There was a pause – just long enough for an angel to pass, flying slowly."

"On we read, confusing the characters with the incidents and neglecting the outcome, but tickled by the images and the turns of the talk. It is frivolous stuff, and how rare, how precious is frivolity! How few writers can prostitute all their powers!"

"The world is so disgracefully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain."

"He had something of the air, if one can imagine such a combination, of a witty and decadent Red Indian."

"I suppose when there's no more room for another crow's-foot, one attains a sort of peace?"

"It is the peculiar temper of Firbank's humour which divides him from the nineties. His raw material, allowing for the inevitable changes of fashion, is almost identical with Oscar Wilde's – the lives of rich, slightly decadent people seen against a background of traditional culture, grand opera, the picture galleries and the Court; but Wilde's was at heart radically sentimental. His wit is ornamental; Firbank's is structural. Wilde is rococo; Firbank is baroque."

"He was a confidence-man, pauper, tutor, blackmailer, paedophile, translator – and author of seven novels and a number of short stories. Rolfe was a trickster whose failed life stank to himself as to the few friends whom he had and betrayed. But he was a fascinating figure: a bore, but also a pseudo-Borgian freak whose vindictiveness and paranoia have deservedly become legendary."

"Rolfe's vice was spiritual more than it was carnal: it might be said that he was a pander and a swindler, because he cared for nothing but his faith. He would be a priest or nothing, so nothing it had to be…If he could not have Heaven, he would have Hell, and the last footprints seem to point unmistakably towards the Inferno."

"He wrote with great care, and with a sharpness, vivacity, and variety of epithet that give immediate and continuing pleasure, but he was not in any serious sense a novelist or even a writer of fiction. His emotionally injured self is the sole character of his fictions, with everybody else seen through the haze of his paranoia, like figures in a fun-fair mirror."

"I have…read it with a good deal of amusement and enjoyment. The latter is due, I suppose, entirely to the subject – for everyone likes to imagine what a man could do if he were a dictator or Pope, or Caliph; the amusement is mainly at the author's expence. The style is one of the most preposterous I have ever read, and I doubt if I ever saw so much pedantry combined with so much ignorance."