Twice-Told Tales, Preface http://www.eldritchpress.org/nh/tttpf.html (1851)
“The books that help you the most are those which make you think the most.”
As quoted in The Gigantic Book of Teachers' Wisdom (2007) by Erin Gruwell and Frank McCourt, p. 496.
Source: How the Mind Works (1997), p. 359
Response to a would be biographer in 1980, as quoted in "When Stephen met Sylvia" in The Guardian (24 April 2004) http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1201328,00.html
Context: I am very honoured by your wanting to write a life of me. But the fact is I regard my life as rather a failure in the only thing in which I wanted it to succeed. I have not written the books I ought to have written and I have written a lot of books I should not have written. My life as lived by me has been interesting to me but to write truthfully about it would probably cause much pain to people close to me — and I always feel that the feelings of the living are more important than the monuments of the dead.
as reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 29.
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other you will find what is needful for you in a book.”
Source: The Marquis of Lossie
in John 20:30-31 as quoted in www.ewtn.com http://www.ewtn.com/ewtn/bible/search_bible.asp#ixzz2yvGxUYR6
Gospel of John
Variant: There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
