What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

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Source, in full

First attributed to Johnson 15 years posthumously in a footnote in William Seward's Biographiana (1799), but written in slightly different form in 1764, in a profile in The Scots Magazine of Charles Churchill.The Scots Magazine, Volume 26

Notes from Wikiquote

Quote Investigator, retrieved 17 May 2016

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Samuel Johnson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.