“If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.”

The press was busy printing money.
Source: Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975), Chapter V, Of Paper, p. 54

It's a roll call of dead books.
Salon interview (1997)

Variant: Nobody's life is filled with perfect little moments. And if it were they wouldn't be perfect little moments. They would just be normal. ow would you know happiness if you never experienced downs?
Source: P.S. I Love You

Anonymous 17th century comment on the flyleaf of the Lambeth Manuscript of Traherne’s works; cited from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) vol. 55, p. 208.
Criticism

quote, c. 1920; in Buchheim, Künstlergemeinschaft Brücke, p. 303; as cited in 'The Revival of Printmaking in Germany', I. K. Rigby; in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings - Essays Vol 1.; published by Museum Associates, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California & Prestel-Verlag, Germany, 1986, pp. 40-41

"The Prevention of Literature" (1946)
Context: Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops. This was well illustrated by the Spanish civil war. To many English intellectuals the war was a deeply moving experience, but not an experience about which they could write sincerely. There were only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies: as a result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth reading.

Source: The Sword of Summer

Source: The Angel's Game