In the 1920s, Sinclair Lewis became one of the most successful writers in America. During that decade he penned a series of five hugely popular novels: Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith,…
Category: Book quotes
“The rich are different”… The legendary “exchange” between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway…
If you’re a quotation buff, you’ve probably heard of a legendary exchange about “rich people” that supposedly took place between the American novelists F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) and Ernest Hemingway…
“I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
I’m a big fan of the Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel The Godfather and the movie that was made from it in 1972. I am also a big fan of vintage…
“Prose = words in their best order; — poetry = the best words in the best order.”
Most of the best-known quotes by the British poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge come from his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and Kubla Khan (1816). But…
The secret behind the famous phrase “the heart is a lonely hunter”…
On June 4, 1940, Houghton Mifflin published the first novel by the American writer Carson McCullers, a sensitive story about misfits and social outcasts in a Southern mill town titled…
“We don’t need no stinking badges!” – the misquote that became a famous quote
“We don’t need no stinking badges!” is one of the few famous lines that is both a famous quote and a misquote. It’s also the source of many variations about…
“He who destroys a good book kills reason itself.”
In the 1630s, England’s infamous “Star Chamber” (sort of a politically-oriented version of the Spanish Inquisition) banned the printing or sale of “any seditious, scismaticall, or offensive Bookes or Pamphlets.”…
“Never play cards with a man called Doc” — and other advice from Nelson Algren…
The copyright record for the novel A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren says it was copyrighted on May 18, 1956. Traditionally, the copyright date is also a…
“I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”
The great American poet Robert Frost died in 1963, when he was 88 years old. But he wrote his epitaph more than two decades before that, in a poem titled…