“I can get on with wild beasts first-rate; but men rile me awfully…”

“In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.”

“The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but the first-rate writer can only be experience. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.”

“Such actions are beyond praise: it is the perfume of such sweet and noble human sympathy that makes this wild beasts' cage a world habitable for men.”

“It is not that I want merely to be called a Christian, but to actually be one. Yes, if I prove to be one, then I can have the name...Come fire, cross, battling with wild beasts, wrenching of bones, mangling of limbs, crushing of my whole body, cruel tortures of the Devil--Only let me get to Jesus Christ!”

“I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.”