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"I suppose half the time Shakespeare just shoved down anything that came into his head."
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"Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire."
"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."
"I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt."
"It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."
"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."
"A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is...like a life without pictures."
"And Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book."
"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
"To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read."
"I have been reading three books Dean lent me this week. One was like a rose garden--very pleasant, but just a little too sweet. And one was like a pine wood on a mountain--full of balsam and tang--I loved it, and yet it filled me with a sort of despair. It was written so beautifully--I can never write like that, I feel sure. And one--it was just like a pig-sty. Dean gave me that one by mistake."
Explore more quotes by P. G. Wodehouse
"He was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say "when!""
"Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels."
"It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them."
"Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting."
"There is only one cure for gray hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine."
"Success comes to a writer as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed."
"I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed I suppose."
"Suiffy, have you ever felt a sort of strange emptiness in the heart? A sort of aching void of the soul?''Oh, rather!''What do you do about it?''I generally take a couple of cocktails."
"When you have been just told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to another, you begin to understand how Anarchists must feel when the bomb goes off too soon."
"It was a nasty look. It made me feel as if I were something the dog had brought in and intended to bury later on, when he had time."
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