Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print. Barbara Tuchman, The Book, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 34:2, 1980

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. William Strunk Jr.

PLATITUDE, n. The fundamental element and special glory of popular literature. A thought that snores in words that smoke. The wisdom of a million fools in the diction of a dullard. A fossil sentiment in artificial rock. A moral without the fable. All that is mortal of a departed truth. A demi-tasse of milk-and-mortality. The Pope's-nose of a featherless peacock. A jelly-fish withering on the shore of the sea of thought. The cackle surviving the egg. A desiccated epigram. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary 

A metaphor is both detour and destination, a digression that gets to the point. James Geary

[Captain Hook] is not wholly evil: he has a Thesaurus in his cabin. J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

The covers of this book are too far apart. Ambrose Bierce

That's not writing - that' typing. Truman Capote, on Jack Kerouac (Attrib.) 

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer, he has mastered everything except language; as a novelist, he can do everything, except tell a story; as an artist, he is everything except articulate. Oscar Wilde on George Meredith

He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. H. L. Mencken on US President Warren G. Harding

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good. Samuel Johnson

This book fills a much-needed gap. Moses Hadas

Meditation is a gift confined to unknown philosophers and cows. Others don't begin to think till they begin to talk or write. Finley Peter Dunne

There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. Oscar Wilde

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket. George Orwell

Postmodernists have achieved the ability to write about their thoughts in a uniquely impenetrable manner. Their neo-baroque prose style with its inner clauses, bracketed syllables, metaphors and metonyms, verbal pirouettes, curlicues and figures is not a mere epiphenomenon; rather, it is a mocking rejoinder to anyone who would try to write simple intelligible sentences in the modernist tradition. Marvin Harris, Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times

I take the view, and always have done, that if you cannot say what you have to say in twenty minutes, you should go away and write a book about it. Lord Brabazon

You don’t write because you want to say something. You write because you’ve got something to say. F. Scott Fitzgerald

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