Quotes About Literature

He said if I warn't so ignorant, but had read a book called Don Quixote, I would know without asking. He said it was all done by

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscious: this is the ideal life.

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words. -Mark Twain

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter - 'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

C?r?ile mele sunt ca apa. C?r?ile marilor genii sunt ca vinul. Din fericire toat? lumea bea ap?.

way. And there ain't no OTHER way, that ever I heard of, and I've read all the books that gives any information about these things.

I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value--certainly no large value.

The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage the man who can't read them

Great books are weighted and measured by their style and matter, and not the trimmings and shadings of their grammar.

T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.

Schreiben ist leicht, man muss nur die falschen Worte weglassen.

Books are the liberated spirits of men.

The Mormon Bible is rather stupid and tiresome to read, but there is nothing vicious in its teachings. Its code of morals is unobjectionable- -it is smouched [Milton] from the New Testament and no credit given.

the palace considerable; but the duke stayed huffy a good while

Does Jane Austen do her work too remorselessly well? For me, I mean? Maybe that is it. She makes me detest all her people, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worth while, too. Some day I will examine the other end of her books and see.

The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.- Mark Twain (Letter to George Bainton, 10/15/1888)

I was sorry to have my name mentioned among the great authors because they have a sad habit of dying off

Between 1870 and 1905 Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) tried repeatedly, and at long intervals, to write (or dictate) his autobiography, always shelving the manuscript before he had made much progress. By

Ä°yi kitaplar okumayan biriyle, okuma yazma bilmeyen biri aras?nda hiçbir fark yoktur.

PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD AND RIDERS TO THE SEA, J. M. Synge. 80pp. 0-486-27562-0 THE

You don't know about me without you have read a book called The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain't no matter.

Nada devem saber a meu respeito a não ser que tenham lido «As Aventuras de Tom Sawyer». Não faz mal. O livro foi escrito pelo senhor Mark Twain, e ele contava quase sempre a verdade.

PREFACE Book

Consider the three years sped. Now look around on England. A happy and prosperous country, and strangely altered. Schools everywhere, and several colleges; a number of pretty good newspapers. Even authorship was taking a start; Sir Dinadan the Humorist was first in the field, with a volume of gray-headed jokes which I had been familiar with during thirteen centuries.