“I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.”
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Vladimir Nabokov 193
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor 1899–1977Related quotes

“Spare no effort to suppress selfishness, unless that effort would entail sorrow.”
Misattributed, Jackson's personal book of maxims

Salon interview (2000)

Letter to John Davis (18 January 1824). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-12_Bk.pdf, pp. 331–332
1820s
Context: I thank you, Sir, for the copy you were so kind as to send me of the revd. Mr. Bancroft's Unitarian sermons. I have read them with great satisfaction, and always rejoice in efforts to restore us to primitive Christianity, in all the simplicity in which it came from the lips of Jesus. Had it never been sophisticated by the subtleties of Commentators, nor paraphrased into meanings totally foreign to its character, it would at this day have been the religion of the whole civilized world. But the metaphysical abstractions of Athanasius, and the maniac ravings of Calvin, tinctured plentifully with the foggy dreams of Plato, have so loaded it with absurdities and incomprehensibilities, as to drive into infidelity men who had not time, patience, or opportunity to strip it of its meretricious trappings[. ]

“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”
First attributed to Johnson 15 years posthumously in a footnote in William Seward's Biographiana (1799), but written in slightly different form in 1764, in a profile in The Scots Magazine of Charles Churchill. The Scots Magazine, Volume 26 https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=y14AAAAAYAAJ&q=%22without+effort%22&redir_esc=y&hl=en#v=snippet&q=%22without%20effort%22&f=false
Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/08/without-effort/, retrieved 17 May 2016
Misattributed
Source: Johnsonian Miscellanies - Vol II