“I have spent myself on all kinds of things … I have advanced much politically but I have written little and moreover have written it badly.”

— Ba Jin

As quoted in "Ba Jin", obituary in The Times (25 October 2005) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article582233.ece?print=yes&randnum=1195994894125

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Ba Jin 36

Chinese novelist 1904–2005

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

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.

“There is no such thing, wrote Oscar Wilde, as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. Presumably, then, Mein Kampf would have been all right had it been better written.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

Trash, Violence, and Versace: But Is It Art? http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_1_urbanities-trash.html (Winter 1998).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) Italian philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet

"Letter of 1607", as cited by Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., 2012, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, p. 218.

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

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