Robert Louis Stevenson

Who was Robert Louis Stevenson?

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer. His most famous works are Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

A literary celebrity during his lifetime, Stevenson now ranks among the 26 most translated authors in the world. His works have been admired by many other writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Bertolt Brecht, Arthur Conan Doyle, Cesare Pavese, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Barrie, and G. K. Chesterton, who said of him that he "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins."

Famous Quotes:

• Everyone lives by selling something.
• The little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.
• The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty.
• Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
• For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!
• A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.
• If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say give them up, for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.
• The saints are the sinners who keep on trying.
• Wine is bottled poetry.
• Quite minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.