... a slim volume of philosophy.

I should have listened to the advice I had been given by Tom Maschler, then one of the most successful publishers in London. If I wanted to be taken seriously as an author, he told me, I should write a long book. I objected that I didn’t think I could write a very good long book. Whether it was good or not was beside the point, he said, provided it was long.

—Michael Frayn, 2009 Introduction to Constructions.

... a waste-book.

Out of an exaggerated care to avoid a disaster you do precisely that which brings one down upon you, whereas if you had done nothing you would certainly have been safe: this is one of the most annoying of situations to be in. For in addition to the unpleasantness of the thing itself you have also the mortification of self-reproach and of having made yourself ludicrous in the eyes of others. I have seen someone smash a valuable vase by trying to move it from where it had been standing quietly for at least six months simply because he was afraid it might one day be accidentally knocked over.

—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, K54, translated by R. J. Hollingdale.

... a philosopher.

Without too much you cannot have enough, of anything. Lots of inferior books, lots of bad statues, lots of dull speeches, of tenth-rate men and women, as a condition of the few precious specimens in either kind being realized!

—William James, A Pluralistic Universe, 143.

... an aphorism.

Children are entertaining because they are easily entertained.

—Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Book of Friends.

... a closet drama.

Clergyman: Why did you take your own life?
Katrin: Because I lost my curiosity.

—Max Frisch, Triptych, Second Panel.

... a library catalogue's blurb.

... the most dazzling and unclassifiable work of fiction in any language.

... the first chapter of a novel.

You going to listen or talk?
I want it to be a long story.
It is a long story.
Put everything in it.
I always put everything in.
Is it good and long? Good stories are long.
Well, they ought to be, anyway. So, let's see ...

—William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck, p. 24.

... a novel.

[The newspapers] could never tell you anything good, because the one fact that outweighs all others—that life is bearable to most of us, most of the time, in spite of everything—is not news.

—Christopher Isherwood, The World in the Evening.

... a biography of Thomas and Jane Carlyle.

When an ordinary man and woman decide on marriage the step is remarkable enough. Two people who don’t know each other to any extent (they cannot!) invite each other to all meals, and to bed, and to house, for the rest of their lives. It sounds crazy. It often works. Even so it is an extraordinary venture, no matter how often or universally done. If one of the couple is a genius, an additional hazard of uncertain and possibly appalling proportions is present. If both of them are a genius it is worse.

—John Stewart Collis, The Carlyles: A Biography of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, p. 36.

... a novel.

They used his room at Mrs. Quilty's, spending long afternoons there. He did things with his mouth she had never dared imagine. He invented the ways she felt.

—Harry Mathews, Cigarettes, 38.

... a novel.

Thomas Mann's definition of a writer. Someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

—David Markson, Reader’s Block.

... fifty years of essays, letters, and articles collected for the first time in book form.

I am afraid of a soldier, not because he is a brave man, but because he is so utterly unmanned by discipline that he will kill me if he is told, even when he knows that the order is given because I am trying to overthrow the oppression which he fears and hates.

—George Bernard Shaw, "A Dramatic Realist to His Critics," The New Review XI, July 1894, collected in Shaw on Theatre, ed. E. J. West.

... a novel.

I am not particularly happy over this new habit of saying things that I have very little idea what I mean by saying, to tell the truth.

—David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, 58.

... a Facebook post.

What kind of sick world do we live in if we cannot think more thoughtful?

—somebody on Facebook.

... infernal letters.

The Enemy [God] wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour’s talents—or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall.

—C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, ch. 14.

... essays.

Literary gatherings, cocktail parties and the like, are a social nightmare because writers have no "shop" to talk. Writers have no impersonal professional interests. The literary equivalent of talking shop would be writers reciting their own work at each other, an unpopular procedure for which only very young writers have the nerve.

—W. H. Auden, "Writing," in The Dyer's Hand, p. 14.

... a physical approach to acting.

The air is full of invisible kisses.

—Stephen Wangh, An Acrobat of the Heart, p. 92.

... a physical approach to acting.

Are all emotions and image worlds available to me?

—Stephen Wangh, An Acrobat of the Heart, p. 38.

... the life of a poet.

He that misses his end will never be as much pleased as he that attains it, even when he can impute no part of his failure to himself; and when the end is to please the multitude, no man perhaps has a right, in things admitting of gradation and comparison, to throw the whole blame upon his judges, and totally to exclude diffidence and shame by a haughty consciousness of his own excellence.

—Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets, "Cowley."

... a usage guide.

It's in the dictionary, but that doesn't mean you have to use it.

—William Strunk, Jr., The Elements of Style, IV, entry for "prestigious."

... the heart of hidden reality.

When others raised the objection "but if everybody were to behave like you ...," he replied that this possibility seemed to him so implausible that he did not feel obliged to take it into account.

—The Economist, August 20, 1998, p. 70. Quoted in Love and Math by Edward Frenkel. The story is about André Weil, who during WWII felt it was his duty, "not just to himself but also to civilization, to devote his life to mathematics."

... a preface.

My powers are waning; but so much the better for those who found me unbearably brilliant when I was in my prime.

—George Bernard Shaw, preface to Back to Methuselah.

... the Oxford book of aphorisms.

It is no more necessary that a man should remember the different dinners and suppers which have made him healthy, than the different books which have made him wise. Let us see the results of good food in a strong body, and the result of great reading in a full and powerful mind.

—Sydney Smith, Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy.

... an excerpt.

Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.

—W. H. Auden, "Reading," in The Dyer’s Hand.

... some aphorisms.

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds; it is something one creates.

—Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin, 49.

... a blank-verse play.

... how slow his soul sailed on, how swift his ship.

—William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, I.iii.

... The Koran.

Good and evil are not alike. Requite evil with good, and he who is your enemy will become your dearest friend.

—The Koran, translated by N. J. Dawood, 41.

... about meditation, consciousness, and creativity.

You don't need anything outside of the work. There have been a lot of great books written, and the authors are long since dead and you can't dig them up. But you've got that book, and a book can make you dream and make you think about things.

—David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish, 19.

... a history of England.

Man acknowledges in the inferior animals no right inconsistent with his own convenience.

—Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England, chap. XIX.

... an image.

The lights gathering
on the night lake
sing a thousand songs
of the sleeping sun.

—Henry Dumas, “Image,” Thoughts/Images.

... a novel.

"This is the real article. It is double-rectified busthead from Madison County, aged in the keg. A little spoonful would do you a power of good."

"I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains."

—Charles Portis, True Grit, p. 61 (of 224).