Nothing improves an unappealing fish quite so much as a ruffle of parsley around the platter’s edge. By the same token, no device will help a dull paper more than an apt quotation, smoothly inserted.

These hoary truths are prompted by publication of a second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase, Saying and Quotation. It is one more valuable volume in a series that now includes the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations and an abridged two-volume version of the humongous Oxford English Dictionary. If the Oxford University Press did not exist, to paraphrase Voltaire, it would be necessary to invent it.

The granddaddy of all books of quotations, of course, will always be the indispensable Bartlett’s, now in its 17th edition since 1863. The only problem with Bartlett’s is that writers must have some firm idea of the key word in the phrase they are looking for. For many years I thought it was Gibbon who said that the happiest hours of mankind were recorded on the blank pages of history. I never would have found the quotation in Bartlett’s alphabetical index. It took only a minute to find it in Oxford’s topical index under the heading of “History.” (It wasn’t Gibbon; it was attributed to Montesquieu by Carlyle, “Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books!”)

For the editorial writer or casual essayist, topical arrangement is a godsend. In addition to the new work from Oxford, I can recommend H.L. Mencken’s New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles From Ancient and Modern Sources, published by Knopf in 1962. Another excellent compendium, by topic, is the Macmillan Dictionary of Quotations (1989). A more specialized selection is topically arranged in “Respectfully Quoted,” a dictionary of quotations requested from the Congressional Research Service, published by the Library of Congress in 1989.

The new Oxford gives us 33 entries under “Writers” and 53 under the heading of “Writing.” Nicolas Boileau (1636- 1711), the French poet and critic, boasted of his approach to editing: “Of every four words I write, I strike out three.” Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) approvingly quoted his college tutor: “Read over your composition, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out!” Mark Twain was to the same effect: “As to the adjective, when in doubt, strike it out.”

Oxford’s editor, Susan Ratcliffe, has included a number of quotations likely to deter the young writer who regards the craft romantically. “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” said Dr. Johnson. George Burrow (1803-1881) looked upon writing as “a losing trade, I assure you; literature is a drug.” Georges Simenon (1903-1989) said writing is not a profession, “but a vocation of unhappiness.” Tolstoy said journalists work in “an intellectual brothel from which there is no retreat.”

Bennett Cerf, editor and publisher, recalled some dire bits of biography: “Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was stabbed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab … Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to be a writer – and if so, why?”

To those discouraging observations I can add a little parsley from other collections. A thousand years ago, Abelard had advice for Heloise: “Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.” Two thousand years ago, Horace voiced an editor’s counsel: “If you want to be read more than once, do not hesitate to blot often.”

In our own time, Gene Fowler went to the heart of the writing art. “Writing is easy,” he said. “All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”

I venture only this counsel on the use of quotations: Don’t hang a quote on a paragraph like a tail on a birthday donkey. Quotations should appear naturally in your writing, as if you had never looked them up at all. If this be chicanery, it is harmless chicanery – as harmless, indeed, as parsley on a platter.

James Kilpatrick is a syndicated columnist.

Copy the Story Link