“What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?”

Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 6 (p. 36).

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?" by George Steiner?
George Steiner photo
George Steiner 74
American writer 1929–2020

Related quotes

Louis B. Mayer photo

“The number one book of the ages was written by a committee, and it was called The Bible.”

Louis B. Mayer (1884–1957) American film producer

To a writer who complained that his work was being changed.
Halliwell's Who's Who in the Movies (2001 ed)

Novalis photo

“Many counterrevolutionary books have been written in favor of the Revolution. But Burke has written a revolutionary book against the Revolution.”

Fragment No. 104; on Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
Blüthenstaub (1798)

Ernest Hemingway photo
Terry Pratchett photo

“While a book has got to be worthwhile from the point of view of the reader it's got to be worthwhile from the point of view of the writer as well.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

alt.fan.pratchett (1 December 1998) http://www.lspace.org/fandom/afp/timelines/discussions/is-pterry-going-downhill.html
Usenet

“Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report?”

Alfred Whitney Griswold (1906–1963) American historian

Address at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (9 June 1957).
Context: Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer.

Theodore Dalrymple photo

“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)

Leo Tolstoy photo
Felix Frankfurter photo

“It would be a narrow conception of jurisprudence to confine the notion of 'laws' to what is found written on the statute books, and to disregard the gloss which life has written upon it.”

Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965) American judge

Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway. v. Browning, 310 U.S. 362, 369 (1940).
Judicial opinions

Francis Bacon photo

Related topics