
Source: The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1, 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist
Foreword p. vii
The New Industrial State (1967)
Source: The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1, 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist
“Authors write books for one, and only one, reason: because we like to torture people.”
Source: Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians
Dedicatory letter to Stella Ford http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/fmf/gsdl.htm (1927-01-09) in The Good Soldier, second edition.
“Well, I've worried some about, you know, why write books”
"A Talk with Kurt Vonnegut. Jr." by Robert Scholes in The Vonnegut Statement (1973) edited by Jerome Klinkowitz and John Somer October 1966), later published in Conversations With Kurt Vonnegut (1988), p. 123
Various interviews
Context: Well, I've worried some about, you know, why write books … why are we teaching people to write books when presidents and senators do not read them, and generals do not read them. And it's been the university experience that taught me that there is a very good reason, that you catch people before they become generals and presidents and so forth and you poison their minds with … humanity, and however you want to poison their minds, it's presumably to encourage them to make a better world.
Attributed to Butler in: American Dental Association (1959) The Journal of the American Dental Association. Vol 59. p. 289
Actually a remark by Nicholas Murray Butler.
Quoted by Watson in comments about "Think" and attributed to Nicholas Murray Butler - IBM Archives: Comments on "THINK" - Transcript https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/multimedia/think_trans.html
Misattributed
Source: American Dental Association (1959) The Journal of the American Dental Association. Vol 59. p. 289.