“Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.”
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
F. Scott Fitzgerald 411
American novelist and screenwriter 1896–1940Related quotes
Source: The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1, 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist
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.
“The best books are those, which those who read them believe they themselves could have written.”
The Art of Persuasion
1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet
“I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.”
Georgina and Michael
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover
“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
Fragment No. 104; on Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
Blüthenstaub (1798)