“The hotel shop only had two decent books, and I'd written both of them.”

—  Douglas Adams , book The Salmon of Doubt

Source: The Salmon of Doubt (2002)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Feb. 12, 2022. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The hotel shop only had two decent books, and I'd written both of them." by Douglas Adams?
Douglas Adams photo
Douglas Adams 317
English writer and humorist 1952–2001

Related quotes

Terry Pratchett photo

“If I heeded all the advice I've had over the years, I'd have written 18 books about Rincewind.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Usenet

Terry Pratchett photo

“This book had two authors, and they were both the same person.”

Terry Pratchett book A Hat Full of Sky

Author's note, revised edition (1992).
The Carpet People (1971; 1992)
Source: A Hat Full of Sky

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo

“Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter
Francis Bacon photo

“God has, in fact, written two books, not just one. Of course, we are all familiar with the first book he wrote, namely Scripture. But he has written a second book called creation.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author
Sara Shepard photo

“I understood we used to be close. But they were like books i'd read two summer ago; I knew I'd liked them, but I couldn't tell you now what they'd been about.”

Sara Shepard The Lying Game

Source: The Lying Game

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)

Carlos Ruiz Zafón photo

“In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

“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.”

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.

Edward Everett Hale photo

“The smaller class of the two consists of the books written by people who had something to say. They had in life learned something, or seen something, or done something, which they really wanted and needed to tell to other people. They told it.”

Edward Everett Hale (1822–1909) American author and Unitarian clergyman

Source: How To Do It (1871), Ch. IV : How To Write
Context: You may divide literature into two great classes of books. The smaller class of the two consists of the books written by people who had something to say. They had in life learned something, or seen something, or done something, which they really wanted and needed to tell to other people. They told it. And their writings make, perhaps, a twentieth part of the printed literature of the world. It is the part which contains all that is worth reading. The other nineteen-twentieths make up the other class.

Related topics