The man who reads everything is like the man who eats everything: he can digest nothing, and the penalty of crowding one’s mind with other men’s thoughts is to have no thoughts of one’s own.
Remember that God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States. Neither you nor any other mortal or mortals could have prevented this.
The ordinary literary man, even though he be an eminent historian, is ill-fitted to be a mentor in affairs of government. For… things are for the most part very simple in books, and in practical life very complex.
I could see now that a literary education did not fit one for the popular novelist’s trade.Once you had started using words like flavicomous or acroamatic, because you liked the sound of them, you were lost.
