“If a book is well written, I always find it too short.”

Variant: [I]f a book is well written, I always find it too short.
Source: Sense and Sensibility

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Jane Austen 477
English novelist 1775–1817

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Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

Variant: There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
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James Joyce quote: “Life is too short to read a bad book.”
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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.

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