Only the literary cannot profit from literature.
Feb 172014
The dead alive and busy.
—Vaughan
Only the literary cannot profit from literature.
Too much plot shows too little respect for one’s audience, and too little shows too much.
Many books are least likely to be read by the people who would profit most by reading them.
Only the very cruellest novelists reproduce dialogue accurately.
If you want to keep a secret, put it in the middle of a long book.
Read to be contradicted.
I have never known anyone book-smart, but book-stupid I see every day.
Read a lot: think some: write a little.
Reading old books leavens our fashionable prejudices with a few unfashionable ones.
Unbending virtue dies on the page. Bores, prigs, hypocrites, blowhards, martinets — these are the glories of world literature.