Voltaire? Mark Twain? Richard Brinsley Sheridan? John Bright? Apocryphal? Anonymous? Question for Quote Investigator: Legal conflicts are extraordinarily expensive and time-consuming for all the participants. Even the winner of a lawsuit can suffer financially. The ill-fated contender in two legal entanglements once said something like the following. Here are two versions. The word “gained” is …
Tag Archives: Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Easy Reading Is Hard Writing
Maya Angelou? Nathaniel Hawthorne? Thomas Hood? Richard Brinsley Sheridan? Charles Allston Collins? Anthony Trollope? Lord Byron? William Makepeace Thackeray? Anonymous? Dear Quote Investigator: Writers should strive to create texts that are informative, interesting, stimulating, and readable. But one of my favorite sayings reveals that this can be a remarkably difficult task: Easy reading is damned …
Easy Writing’s Vile Hard Reading
Richard Brinsley Sheridan? Lord Byron? Ernest Hemingway? Anonymous? Dear Quote Investigator: There are two complementary and intertwined statements about reading and writing that I would like you to investigate: 1) Easy writing results in hard reading. 2) Easy reading requires hard writing. Many different phrases have been used to express these two thoughts, and sometimes …
Your Manuscript Is Good and Original, But What is Original Is Not Good; What Is Good Is Not Original
Samuel Johnson? Martin Sherlock? Johann Heinrich Voss? Gotthold Ephraim Lessing? Richard Brinsley Sheridan? Daniel Webster? Samuel Wilberforce Dear Quote Investigator: The great lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson is credited with a famously devastating remark about a book he was evaluating: Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, …
The Only Unnatural Sex Act Is That Which One Cannot Perform
Alfred Kinsey? Richard Brinsley Sheridan? Xaviera Hollander? William Burroughs? Sigmund Freud? Anonymous? Dear Quote Investigator: Years ago I read a statement credited to the researcher Alfred Kinsey who was famous for producing the Kinsey Reports on sexual behavior. I do not remember the exact phrasing but the expression was similar to this: The only unnatural …
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