Anatole France frankly advised, "When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it." Yes, indeed, but do more. Copy many…

- Gary Saul Morson

Unless created as freestanding works, quotations resemble "found" art. They are analogous, say, to a piece of driftwood identified as formally intere…

- Gary Saul Morson

I wonder if "an" ever occurs before "haughty" except in a quotation, or whether you can make anything sound like a quotation by adding a word like "g…

- Gary Saul Morson

Not everything that can be extracted appears in anthologies of quotations, in commonplace books, or on the back of Celestial Seasonings boxes. Only c…

- Gary Saul Morson

A single gnomic line can come to resonate with centuries of subsequent wisdom.

- Gary Saul Morson

An anthology of quotations is a museum of utterances.

- Gary Saul Morson

Reframing an extract as a quotation constitutes a kind of coauthorship. With no change in wording, the cited passage becomes different. I imagine tha…

- Gary Saul Morson

The attribution of a speaker is in fact a part of the quotation. Some statements simply are better if a certain famous person said them.

- Gary Saul Morson

People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fa…

- Gary Saul Morson