Scarcely any degree of judgment is sufficient to restrain the imagination from magnifying that on which it is long detained
Samuel JohnsonYou need a good editor because every writer thinks he can write a War and Peace, but by the time he gets it on paper, it's not War and Peace anymore; it's comic-book stuff. Your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.
Samuel JohnsonExcise: A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.
Samuel JohnsonThe whole power of cunning is privative; to say nothing, and to do nothing , is the utmost of its reach. Yet men, thus narrow by nature and mean by art, are sometimes able to rise by the miscarriages of bravery and the openness of integrity, and, watching failures and snatching opportunities, obtain advantages which belong to higher characters.
Samuel Johnson