It is bad enough to see one’s own good things fathered on other people, but it is worse to have other people’s rubbish fathered upon oneself. – Samuel Butler
Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such. – Samuel Butler
Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on. – Samuel Butler
Faith – you can do very little with it, but you can do nothing without it. – Samuel Butler
People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fascinated by these short genres. They seem to lie just where my heart is, somewhere between literature and philosophy. – Gary Saul Morson, The Long and Short of It: From Aphorism to Novel, 2012