The quotation-business is booming. No subdivision of the culture seems too narrow to have a quotation book of its own…. It would be an understatement to say that these books lean on one another. To compare them is to stroll through a glorious jungle of incestuous mutual plagiarism. – James Gleick, 1993

For I am proverbed with a grandsire phrase… – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

[T]here are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion. – Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift, 1963, translated from Russian by Michael Scammell

It is probably to Talleyrand, that Receiver-General of waif wit and estray epigram, that more sayings have been wrongly attributed than to any other modern. – William Mathews, “Quotation and Misquotation,” in North American Review, January