Wide World of Quotes > Arthur Quiller-Couch Quotes


Arthur Quiller-Couch
(alternative name: the pseudonym 'Q')
British journalist, critic, and novelist
(1863-1944)



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Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings. [sic]
-- On the Art of Writing: Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge, 1913–1914

The best is the best, though a hundred judges have declared it so; nor had it been any feat to search out and insert the second-rate merely because it happened to be recondite. To be sure, a man must come to such a task as mine haunted by his youth and the favourites he loved in days when he had much enthusiasm but little reading.
-- Oxford Book of English Verse (1900), Preface


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The selection of the above quotes and the writing of the accompanying notes was performed by the author David Paul Wagner.

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