Application Quote by Charles de Saint-Evremond

“Whatever reader desires to have a thorough comprehension of an author's thoughts cannot take a better method than by putting himself into the circumstances…

— Jonathan Swift

“…This remains the great deficiency of literature: its imitation of nature cannot prepare you for the main events. For the main events, only experience…

— Martin Amis

That's what Samuel Johnson said: "Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think particularly fine, strike it out."

— Nick Laird

The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries.…

— Henry Miller

The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

— Umberto Eco

Some authors write nonsense in a clear style, and others sense in an obscure one; some can reason without being able to persuade, others…

— Charles Caleb Colton

“[T]he greater the sense of awe with which a text was regarded, the more complete might be the amnesia as to the original circumstances…

— Tom Holland

“When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Whatever truth you have chosen, read only a small portion of it, endeavouring to taste and digest it, to extract the essence and substance…

— Madame Guyon

For even the most childish intoxication with progress will soon be forced to recognize that writing and books have a function that is eternal.…

— Hermann Hesse

“As this is one of those deep observations which very few readers can be supposed capable of making themselves, I have thought proper to…

— Henry Fielding

“Writing, in its noblest function, is the attempt to unerase, to unearth, to find the primitive picture again, ours, the one that frightens us.”

— Hélène Cixous