“Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.” — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
“Literature is too full of 'acknowledgments' and squabbles about originality...” — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself. — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
When you read a biography remember that the truth is never fit for publication. — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty. — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
It is clear that a novel cannot be too bad to be worth publishing. . . . It certainly is possible for… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
People must not be forced to adopt me as their favourite author, even for their own good. — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
Two people getting together to write a book is like three people getting together to have a baby. One of them is… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
A book is like a child: it is easier to bring it into the world than to control it when it is… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
Keep away from books and from men who get their ideas from books, and your own books will always be fresh. — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
“Wilde's permanent celebrity belongs to literature, and only his transient notoriety to police news.” — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
What a heartbreaking job it is trying to combine authors for their own protection... the first lesson I learned was that when… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
Captain Shotover: How much does your soul eat? Ellie: Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
I don't know what to say about this book. The experience on which it is founded is so extraordinary, that an honest… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
I object to publishers: the one service they have done me is to teach me to do without them. They combine commercial… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
I find it easy to forgive the man who invented a devilish instrument like dynamite, but how can one ever forgive the… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
You don't expect me to know what to say about a play when I don't know who the author is, do you?… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
Just as the historian can teach no real history until he has cured his readers of the romantic delusion that the greatness… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
“I owe all my originality, such as it is, to my determination not to be a literary man. Instead of belonging to… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
Perhaps I had better inform my Protestant readers that the famous Dogma of Papal Infallibility is by far the most modest pretension… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
“The world shown us in books, whether the books be confessed epics or professed gospels, or in codes, or in political orations,… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
You may well ask me why...I took the time to write [books]. I can only reply that I do not know. There… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author's equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus. — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
I have made it so perfectly clear in my tracts, articles, and books what was to be done that all Parliament has… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
The road to ignorance is paved with good editions. Only the illiterate can afford to buy good books now. — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read. — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
The fact is that the intrinsic worth of the book, play or whatever the author is trying to sell is the least,… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
The lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book. — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
A pornographic novelist is one who exploits the sexual instinct as a prostitute does. A legitimate sex novel elucidates it or brings… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
For nearly twenty years I have been a published author... But I have never yet seen a book of mine offered for… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
Literature is like any other trade; you will never sell anything unless you go to the right shop. — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
I must ... warn my readers that my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures. — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads. — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
I love little children too but I don't cut off their heads and stick them in vases. — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
Blasphemy and sedition (meaning the truth about Church and State). — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
In the arts of life, man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
“My religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative evolution. I desire… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts. — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
You are my inspiration and my folly. You are my light across the sea, my million nameless joys, and my day's wage. You are… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability. — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death. — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
A man who is not a communist at the age of twenty is a fool. Any man who is still communist at the age… — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
But to admire a strong person and to live under that strong person’s thumb are two different things. — George Bernard Shaw Copy Share Image
![“You may well ask me why...I took the time to write [books]. I can only reply that I do not know. There was no why about it. I had to: that was all.” quote by George Bernard Shaw](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/14d/george-bernard-shaw-68_ask-me_you-may-well-ask-me-why-i-took-the-time_2264103.jpg)
