Always scribble, scribble!

"Dr. Donne's verse are like the peace of God; they pass all understanding."
- James I, on John Donne

"Reading him is like wading through glue."
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, on Ben Jonson

"I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand."
- Ben Jonson, on William Shakespeare

"Another damned thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?"
- The Duke of Gloucester, to Edward Gibbon

"I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, with, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer is...marriageableness...Suicide is more respectable."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, on Jane Austen

"Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs from the Chicago stockyards."
- H.L. Mencken, on Henry James

"He spares no resource in telling of his dead inventions...Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He splits infinitives and fills them with adverbial stuffing. His vast paragraphs sweat and struggle; they could not sweat and elbow and struggle more if God Himself was the processional meaning to which they sought to come."
- H.G. Wells, on Henry James

"Why don't you write books people can read?"
- Nora Joyce, to her husband, James Joyce

"Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht, Faulkner, Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me, and I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted as "great literature" by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterley's copulations or the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total fake."
- Vladimir Nabokov, on Ezra Pound and great literature

"I don't like him one bit. He was a poseur. He was married to this woman who was very pretty. My husband [H.G. Wells} and I were asked to see them, and my husband roamed around the flat and there were endless photographs of T.S. Eliot and bits of his poetry done in embroidery by pious American ladies, and only one picture of his wife, and that was when she was getting married. Henry pointed it out to me and said, "I don't think I like that man."'
- Rebecca West, on T.S. Eliot

"A Woollcott second edition."
- Franklin Pierce Adams, replying to Alexander Woollcott's boast, "What is so rare as a Woollcott first edition?"

"I don't like Salinger, not at all. That last thing isn't a novel anyway, whatever it is. I don't like it. Not at all. It suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality, and it's so narcissistic. And to me, also, it seemed so false, so calculated. I simply can't stand it."
- Mary McCarthy, on J.D. Salinger

- Excerpts from Fighting Words, ed. James Charlton

Love is not just for professionals, after all.

But as anyone who actually has made the effort to play the piano knows, it is also infinitely more satisfying and moving to make the music yourself, even if you can't play very well. It's the difference between watching a romantic movie and being in love. Love is not just for professionals, after all. And what makes love so heartbreaking and beautiful is that we are not perfect, that it is ultimately beyond our control and that we must struggle for joy and wrestle with our shortcomings.

Smitten, Cooke recalls a world much of which has faded or vanished, not least the spanking new Steinway baby grands for $985 he helpfully lists along with the $3 rentals. But the music he exalts hasn't. Nor have the benefits of learning to play the music. They go on forever.

- Michael Kimmelman, from the introduction to Charles Cooke's 1941 Playing the Piano for Pleasure

No guide is needed.

Americans love to be told what to do. "You are what you eat!" sells innumerable quack diet books, just as "You are what you read!" brought us the Great Books, the Five-Foot Shelf, and now this colossal act of hubris: the mind-shaping favorites of a hundred professors, annotated. See them astride Plato, Darwin and Freud. Read what they read and be what they be.

I have no list to submit. I care not for this cargo cult. Books are cheap and readily available. To read is the thing, voraciously and eclectically. No guide is needed. Was Moby Dick more important to me than the latest Len Deighton thriller, or is browsing through the Oxford English Dictionary even more significant? And who should care?

Scientists are often regarded as illiterate oafs, unable to write and unwilling to read, captives of their narrow expertise, deserving candidates for humanists' contempt. Yet, most of us are well-read and can hold our own with historians, literary critics and whatever. Humanists, on the other hand, are often (though not always) scientifically and mathematically inept and proudly so. Our conversations must turn on matters of their concern, not ours. We are disadvantaged because we are compelled by their ignorance to match wits on their territory.

Membership in the community of educated men and women demands competence in science and awareness of its history. Many would dispute this claim. Here, I say, lies one explanation for the decline of American intellectualism. We have strayed from the path set by Franklin and Jefferson, who both admired and appreciated Lavoisier as much as they did Shakespeare.

- Sheldon Glashow, The Harvard Guide to Influential Books, 1986