Too much of a good thing | LitBash 41

Here's one example of when it may be "too much of a good thing" (on the other hand it's likely a case of not having enough time to read all these wonderful books) - writers who were...

Born this week:

Tryggve Andersen, Norway

Grazia Deledda, Italy

Josef Skvorecky, Czech
"Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism."

Prosper Merimee, France

Miguel de Cervantes, Spain
"Can we ever have too much of a good thing?"

Johan Falkberget, Norway
"It is the result of the good word or the great, not the narrow-minded or petty criticism. These have not yet changed the world one louse's step."

Truman Capote, USA

Graham Greene, UK
"The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him."

Doris Lessing, UK
"In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools."

Died this week:

Hugh Lofting, UK / USA

Alberto Moravia, Italy
"Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand."

Ivan Goncharov, Russia
"It is a trick among the dishonest to offer sacrifices that are not needed, or not possible, to avoid making those that are required."

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Brasil

Vladimir Zazubrin, Russia

Joe Bousquet, France

Andre Breton, France
"The man who can't visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot."

John Dos Passos, USA
"The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can."

Elia Kazan, USA

Emile Zola, France
"There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman."

Shusaku Endo, Japan

Patrick White, Australia
"Possibly all art flowers more readily in silence."