A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it

If readers recognized that he was an ass, unaware of his own stupidity, ''your work will be a triumph.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.

I can't do literary work for the rest of this year because I'm meditating another lawsuit and looking around for a defendant

A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.

I will say this much for the nobility: that, tyrannical, murderous, rapacious and morally rotten as they were, they were deeply and enthusiastically religous. Nothing could divert them from the regular and faithful performace of the pieties enjoined by the Church.