Alphonse Daudet wore his eye-glasses when asleep. He did his best work when hungry.
Thackeray used to lift his hat whenever he passed the house in which he wrote "Vanity Fair."
Thomas Wentworth Higginson possesses a singular power over wild birds, and can easily tame them.
Alexandre Dumas, the younger, bought a new painting every time he had a new book published.
Robert Louis Stevenson's favorite recreation was playing the flute, in order, as he said, to tune up his ideas.
Robert Browning could not sit still. With the constant shuffling of his feet holes were worn in the carpet.
Longfellow enjoyed walking only at sunrise or sunset, and he said his sublimest moods came upon him at these times.
Washington Irving never mentioned the name of his fiancée after her death, and if anybody else did so, he immediately left the room.
Nathaniel Hawthorne always washed his hands before reading a letter from his wife. He delighted in poring over old advertisements in the newspaper files.
Macaulay kept his closets crammed with elaborately embroidered waistcoats, and the more gaudy they were the better he liked them.