
“We have never heard the devil's side of the story, God wrote all the book.”
An Apology for the Devil
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy
Source: The Note Books of Samuel Butler
“We have never heard the devil's side of the story, God wrote all the book.”
“Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.”
“I cannot choose one hundred best books because I have only written five”
Interview with Matthew Rettenmund in his book "Totally Awesome 80's" (1996), p. 149-150
Fragment No. 104; on Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
Blüthenstaub (1798)
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.