128. From: Only In Books by J. Kevin Graffagnino

A few selections from: Only In Books - Writers, Readers, & Bibliophiles on Their Passion by J. Kevin Graffagnino - Madison House 1996

"Gentleman, I agree with you that Napoleon is a tyrant, a monster, the sworn foe of our nation. But, gentlemen—he once shot a publisher."
Thomas Campbell 1777-1844

"I like a thin book because it will steady a table, a leather volume because it will strop a razor, and a heavy book because it can be thrown at a cat."

"Take an idiot man from a lunatic asylum and marry him to an idiot woman, and the fourth generation of this connection should be a good publisher from the American point of view."

"The difference between the almost-right word and the right word is really a large matter—it's the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning."
Samuel L. Clemens 1835-1910

"There can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books. Printed by people who do not understand them; sold by people who do not understand them; criticized and read by people who do not understand them; and now even written by people who do not understand them."
George Christoph Lichtenberg 1742-1799

"I met Sir Bulwer Lytton. He is anxious about some scheme for some association of literary men. I detest all such associations. I hate the notion of gregarious authors. The less we have to do with each other the better."
Thomas B. Macaulay 1800-1859

"From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it."
Groucho Marx 1891-1977

"There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one know what they are.
W. Somerset Maugham 1874-1965

"Everywhere I go, I'm asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
Flannery O'Connor 1925-1964

"It is said that a retired English colonel one addressed a letter to one of his friends which ran something like this: 'Dear Jones—I hear you are on the public library board and that you are looking for a new librarian. If this is true I wish you would see if you cannot secure the post for old Higgs, my gardener. He was my orderly for a good many years, but when I came here I brought him along with me. He has puttered about the place for a long time, but really the old fellow is getting too feeble and he ought to have some quiet billet at doesn't need much moving about, where he can end his days in peace. He is an honest old fellow and just the man you are after, I am sure."
Edmund Lester Pearson 1880-1937

"I hate books, for they only teach people to talk about what they do not understand."
Jean Jacques Rousseau 1712-1778

"Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad."

"You must not suppose because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living."
George Bernard Shaw 1856-1950

"Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast."
Logan Pearsall Smith 1865-1946

"There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein."
Red Smith 1905-1082