Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.

Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.

The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.

Quotation... A writer expresses himself in words that have been used before because they give his meaning better than he can give it himself, or because they are beautiful or witty, or because he expects them to touch a cord of association in his reader, or because he wishes to show that he is learned and well read. Quotations due to the last motive are invariably ill-advised; the discerning reader detects it and is contemptuous; the undiscerning is perhaps impressed, but even then is at the same time repelled, pretentious quotations being the surest road to tedium.

A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.

The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.

Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

Reading is like permitting a man to talk a long time, and refusing you the right to answer.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: "His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.".

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

A good writer is not necessarily a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.

A quotation, like a pun, should come unsought, and then be welcomed only for some propriety of felicity justifying the intrusion.

That is the point of quotations. One can use another's words to be insulting.

I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.

Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why --but the editorialists forget it --terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.

The principle of procrastinated rape is said to be the ruling one in all the great bestsellers.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.