A writer can get into a vast deal of trouble through misquotation. If you ever want to receive lots of mail, I recommend you get a Shakespeare quote wrong in a magazine or newspaper.” – Joseph Epstein, Foreward to Fred Shapiro’s Yale Book of Quotations, 2006

I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. – Samuel Johnson, quoted in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Joh

Idly curious race of grammarians, ye who dig up by the roots the poetry of others; unhappy bookworms that walk on thorns, defilers of the great… away with you, bugs that bite secretly the eloquent. – Antiphanes of Macedonia, in The Greek Anthology, Volume IV, “Book XI: The Conviv