“I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. … They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.”

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!”

“I regard myself as an entertainer much more than an artist.”

“The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.”

“More than half of all our biblical commentaries between 650 and 850 were written by Irishmen.”

“It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself. All my life had shaped me for the realism, the naturalism of the modern novel, and I could not read enough of them.”

“That author, however, who has thought more than he has read, read more than he has written, and written more than he published, if he does not command success, has at least deserved it.”

“I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.”

“I can imagine no greater bliss than to lie about, reading novels all day.”

“…I have discovered that plays are easier to write than novels if the writer has a certain verbal facility, a certain capacity for the colloquial, an ear for the secret cadences of the spoken word. A play can be written with more ease than a novel…”