Quotes that make you stop

[thatollie]

Perhaps, but quotes aren't about what's correct, it's about what's motivating to hear/read.

[Spell Chick]

Some famous critiques

The covers of this book are too far apart.
     Ambrose Bierce

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
     Dorothy Parker

It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.
     Dame Rose Macaulay

Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.
     Mark Twain

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I'll waste no time reading it.
     Moses Hadas

[Mark H]

Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.

Hurray! I thought I was the only one.

[DGSquared]

A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
- Aldous Huxley

[Gayle]

"Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered." - W. H. Auden

"The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly." - Julian Barnes

[thatollie]

Here's one that always makes me stop.

"Freeze Dirtbag, get your hands in the air."

[Mark H]

Ollie

You do mix with some strange girls!

[Nadine L]

We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindensses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.

Ray Bradbury; Fahrenheit 451


Nadine

[Spell Chick]

"There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love."
    Christopher Morley

[DGSquared]

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. 
                                                  ~E.L. Doctorow


You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
                                                             ~Ray Bradbury



There's nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. 
                                                                     ~Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith



The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. 
                                                                                                    ~Anaïs Nin




A word is not the same with one writer as with another.  One tears it from his guts.  The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. 
                                                                                                                                                        ~Charles Peguy

[Gayle]

My personal favourite...

"I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me."
      - Max Reger, responding to a savage review by Rudolph Louis in Munchener Neueste Nachrichten, February 7, 1906.

Edited to Add:
I just turned the page on my Forgotten English calendar this is the word for the weekend:
"criticaster - a petty or inferior critic; used in contempt" - Sir James Murray's New English Dictionary, 1893

[Spell Chick]

"What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books."
 --  Thomas Carlyle

[Fair to Middling]

Democracy is not perfect and Freedom gives us many difficulties, but we never had to build a wall to keep our people in.

JFK

[Spell Chick]

It is not advisable, James, to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.
    Ayn Rand from Atlas Shrugged, 1957

[thatollie]

"Is good writing a dying art?"
  -- Jezzica85