On the Art of Writing by Arthur Quiller-Couch

Wednesday, January 28, 1914

Should Providence, Gentlemen, destine any one of you to write books for his living, he will find experimentally true what I here promise him, that few pleasures sooner cloy than reading what the reviewers say. This promise I hand on with the better confidence since it was endorsed for me once in conversation by that eminently good man the late Henry Sidgwick; who added, however, "Perhaps I ought to make a single exception. There was a critic who called one of my books ‘epoch-making. ' Being anonymous, he would have been hard to find and thank, perhaps; but I ought to have made the effort."