Quotes on Literature

Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.

Don't set your wit against a child.

He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.

I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.

Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent.

Vanity is a mark of humility rather than of pride.

Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.

Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.

God always strives together with those who strive.

Destiny waits alike for the free man as well as for him enslaved by another's might.

There is no sickness worse for me than words that to be kind must lie.

What is there more kindly than the feeling between host and guest?

One would like to be grand and heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be very something, very great, very heroic; or if not that, then at least very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity that bores me.

The words of truth are simple.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.

It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.

One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Above all, a query letter is a sales pitch and it is the single most important page an unpublished writer will ever write. It's the first impression and will either open the door or close it. It's that important, so don't mess it up. Mine took 17 drafts and two weeks to write.