Literary Birthday – 8 January – Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins was born on 8 January 1824 and died on 23 September 1889.

Wilkie Collins Quotes

1. I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.
2. No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.
3. If the public only knew that every writer worthy of the name is the severest critic of his own book before it ever gets into the hands of the reviewers, how surprised they would be!
4. Books – the generous friends who met me without suspicion – the merciful master who never used me ill!
5. The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.
6. The best men are not consistent in good– why should the worst men be consistent in evil.
7. Women can resist a man’s love, a man’s fame, a man’s personal appearance, and a man’s money, but they cannot resist a man’s tongue when he knows how to talk to them.
8. There are few higher, better, or more profitable enjoyments in this world than reading a good novel.
9. The man who has worked in the full fervour of composition yesterday is the same man who sits in severe and merciless judgement to-day on what he has himself produced.

Wilkie Collins was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. He wrote 30 novels, 60 short stories, 14 plays, and more than 100 essays during the Victorian era. He was an early master of the mystery story, and a pioneer of detective fiction. His best-known works are The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Armadale, and No Name. The Moonstone established many of the ground rules of the modern detective novel and is a clear example of what is now known as the police procedural genre. Collins was a lifelong friend of Charles Dickens and a number of his works were published in Dickens’s journals. The two collaborated and some of Collins’s plays were performed by Dickens’s acting company. In 1873–74, Collins toured the United States and Canada, giving readings of his work. The American writers he met included Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and Mark Twain. He died in 1889.

Source for Image: Public Domain

by Amanda Patterson

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