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"My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language."
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"Stories are like children. They grow in their own way."
"We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading."
"A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images."
"She found as always that words on paper proved themselves, they were so beautifully true."
"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."
"Books. It's always easier to tell people that a character is funny rather than attempt to hit the punchline of a joke that character would've said. But if we all simply told, books would cease to exist. And so would empathy. And feeling."
"My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."
"They say Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I have never led an army, I am a wanderer. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer's 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman."
"Shakespeare shook his head and sunk his chin into his ruff, making him look more owl-like than ever. "I have written about other worlds often enough. I have said what I can say. There are many kinds of reality. This is but one kind."
"Pages entertain me more than pictures do."
Explore more quotes by Edward Gibbon
"I am indeed rich, since my income is superior to my expenses, and my expense is equal to my wishes."
"The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise."
"The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful."
"I understand by this passion the union of desire, friendship, and tenderness, which is inflamed by a single female, which prefers her to the rest of her sex, and which seeks her possession as the supreme or the sole happiness of our being."
"Of the various forms of government which have prevailed in the world, an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule."
"But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous."
"The principles of a free constitution are irrecoverably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive."
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