The Quotations Archive currently contains 1744 quotations.

Writing/Reading

If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.

-- Kingsley Amis

The covers of this book are too far apart.

-- Ambrose Bierce

NOVEL, n. A short story padded.

-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

STORY, n. A narrative, commonly untrue.

-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

Beneath the rule of men entirely great, / The pen is mightier than the sword.

-- Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton, Richelieu, II. ii

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

-- G. K. Chesterton

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

-- G. K. Chesterton

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

-- Tom Clancy

More than kisses, letters mingle souls.

-- John Donne

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

-- T. S. Eliot

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.

-- English Professor, Ohio University

I have read your book and much like it.

-- Moses Hadas, book reviewer

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book - I'll waste no time reading it.

-- Moses Hadas, book reviewer

This book fills a much-needed gap.

-- Moses Hadas, book reviewer

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

-- Oliver Herford

Why don't you write books people can read?

-- Nora Joyce, to her husband James

If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business.

-- Abraham Lincoln

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

-- Groucho Marx

In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.

-- André Maurois

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

-- H. L. Mencken, on Shakespeare

Author: A fool, who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on tormenting the generations to come.

-- Montesquieu

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

-- Flannery O'Connor

There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

-- Flannery O'Connor

This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside, but hurled with great force.

-- Dorothy Parker

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.

-- Jean Jacques Rousseau

Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked it.

-- Alvin Toffler

I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

-- Mark Twain

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

-- Mark Twain

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

-- Mark Twain

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

-- Paul Valery

Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.

-- Frank L. Visco, How to Write Good

I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.

-- E. B. White

Biography lends to death a new terror.

-- Oscar Wilde

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

-- Oscar Wilde

I am a bear of very little brain, and long words bother me.

-- Winnie the Pooh, character created by author A. A. Milne

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

-- Virginia Woolf

Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by the Grove Press, and this pictorial account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is full of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour those sidelights on the management of a midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion the book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping.

-- Ed Zern, Field and Stream, November 1959