Quote

Nearly all bookish people are snobs, and especially the more enlightened among them. They are apt to assume that if a writer has immense circulation, if he is enjoyed by plain persons, and if he can fill several theatres at once, he cannont possibly be worth reading and merits only indifference and disdain.

Arnold Bennett

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Arnold Bennett
Age: 63 †
Born: 1867
Born: May 27
Died: 1931
Died: March 27
Autobiographer
Diarist
Film Writer
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Mother Town
Enoch Arnold Bennett
Persons
Assuming
Indifference
Bookish
People
Enjoyed
Enlightened
Theatres
Theatre
Assume
Snob
Among
Merit
Merits
Especially
Fill
Disdain
Worth
Nearly
Circulation
Writer
Possibly
Plain
Reading
Several
Immense
Snobs

More quotes by Arnold Bennett

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The test of a first-rate work, and a test of your sincerity in calling it a first-rate work, is that you finish it.
Arnold Bennett
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The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt the miraculous interestingness of the universe. If you have formed...literary taste...your life will be one long ecstasy of denying that the world is a dull place.
Arnold Bennett
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Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism.
Arnold Bennett
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It is well, when judging a friend, to remember that he is judging you with the same godlike and superior impartiality.
Arnold Bennett
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The people who live in the past must yield to the people who live in the future. Otherwise the world would begin to turn the other way round.
Arnold Bennett
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Being a husband is a whole time job. That is why so many husbands fail. They cannot give their entire attention to it.
Arnold Bennett
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Great wealth may be to its owner a blessing or a curse. Alas! I fear it is too often the latter. It hardens the heart, blunts the finer susceptibilities, and transforms into a fiend what under more favourable circumstances might have been a human being.
Arnold Bennett
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The best cure for worry, depression, melancholy, brooding, is to go deliberately forth and try to lift with one's sympathy the gloom of somebody else.
Arnold Bennett
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We shall never have more time. We have, and always had, all the time there is. No object is served in waiting until next week or even until tomorrow. Keep going... Concentrate on something useful.
Arnold Bennett
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Prepare to live by all means, but for Heaven's sake do not forget to live.
Arnold Bennett
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The war years count double. Things and people not actively in use age twice as fast.
Arnold Bennett
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Far from the madding crowd is a mistake on a honeymoon.... Solitude! Wherever you are, if you're on a honeymoon, you'll get quite as much solitude as is good for you every twenty-four hours. Constant change and distraction -- that's what wants arranging for. Solitude will arrange itself.
Arnold Bennett
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I ought to reflect again and again, and yet again, that the beings that I have to steer are just as inevitable in the scheme of evolution as I am myself have just as much right to be themselves as I am entitled to and they all deserve from me as much sympathy as I give to myself.
Arnold Bennett
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No mind, however loving, could bear to see plainly into all the recess of another mind.
Arnold Bennett
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Only a very gifted mind could cope singly with all the problems which present themselves in the perfecting of a home.
Arnold Bennett
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I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.
Arnold Bennett
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You can only acquire really useful general ideas by first acquiring particular ideas . . . You cannot make bricks without straw.
Arnold Bennett
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Procrastination is suicide on the installment plan.
Arnold Bennett
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The most important preliminary to the task of arranging one's life so that one may live fully and comfortably within one's daily budget of 24 hours is the calm realization of the extreme difficulty of the task, of the sacrifices and the endless effort which it demands.
Arnold Bennett
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Time is the explicable raw material of everything.
Arnold Bennett