
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)
Variant: There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
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)
1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet
"Letter of 1607", as cited by Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., 2012, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, p. 218.
“If a book is well written, I always find it too short.”
Variant: [I]f a book is well written, I always find it too short.
Source: Sense and Sensibility
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.
A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated (1894)
Fragment No. 104; on Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
Blüthenstaub (1798)