Writing/Reading

This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside, but hurled with great force.

-- Dorothy Parker

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.

-- Jean Jacques Rousseau

Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked it.

-- Alvin Toffler

I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

-- Mark Twain

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

-- Mark Twain

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

-- Mark Twain

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

-- Paul Valery

Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.

-- Frank L. Visco, How to Write Good

I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.

-- E. B. White

Biography lends to death a new terror.

-- Oscar Wilde

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

-- Oscar Wilde

I am a bear of very little brain, and long words bother me.

-- Winnie the Pooh, character created by author A. A. Milne

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

-- Virginia Woolf

Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by the Grove Press, and this pictorial account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is full of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour those sidelights on the management of a midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion the book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping.

-- Ed Zern, Field and Stream, November 1959