Diary, October 30, 1942, published in The Patton Papers 1940-1945 https://books.google.com/books?id=zaRKDgAAQBAJ&pg=PT79 (1996), p. 79.
“A good book is never finished—-it goes on whispering to you from the wall.”
"The Argentine Writer and Tradition", Fervor of Buenos Aires (1923)
Context: Some days past I have found a curious confirmation of the fact that what is truly native can and often does dispense with local color; I found this confirmation in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were especially Arabian; for him they were part of reality, he had no reason to emphasize them; on the other hand, the first thing a falsifier, a tourist, an Arab nationalist would do is have a surfeit of camels, caravans of camels, on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned: he knew he could be an Arab without camels. I think we Argentines can emulate Mohammed, can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color.
“I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish.”
“[The Koran is] not a religious book, but a manual for conquering other people's countries.”
Nick Griffin: 'I'm not anti-Muslim, I'm anti-Islam', BBC (19 April 2010) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8629615.stm
1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet
“I hired finishers because I’m a good starter and a poor finisher.”
ACM Queue A Conversation with Alan Kay Vol. 2, No. 9 - Dec/Jan 2004-2005 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523
2000s, A Conversation with Alan Kay, 2004–05
“A book is never finished; it's abandoned.”
Quoted in H. Allen Smith's The Life and Legend of Gene Fowler (1977); as cited by Paul Dickson (1990), The New Official Rules, p. 74
On Muhammad, in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Noten und Abhandlungen zum West-östlichen Diwan (1958), WA I, 7, 32; translator unknown
