Life & Wisdom Quote by Dorothy L. Sayers

A neat little confession disguised as a flex: Sayers frames laziness as efficiency, then lets the joke cut both ways. On the surface, its a wisecrack about leaning on other peoples words. Underneath, its a jab at a culture that treats citations like personality and reading like a substitute for judgment. The line works because it flatters the speaker (look how well-read I am) while quietly indicting her (look how rarely I risk being wrong in my own voice).

Sayers knew the value of borrowed language. She made her name in puzzle-box detective fiction, where the pleasure is often in arrangement, not invention: clues, conventions, canonical references, all recombined with control. She also lived in a Britain that prized the properly sourced remark - the educated classs parlor sport of ready quotations and literary name-checking. In that world, a memorized line could pass as intellect, a kind of social currency.

The subtext is sharper: quotation can be both a shortcut and a shield. It saves thinking in the way a script saves improvisation; it keeps you inside the safety rails of received wisdom. Sayers, a writer and an intellectual, is also poking at her own professional temptation: authors build originality out of inherited material all the time, but the difference between art and parroting is whether you transform whats borrowed or hide behind it.

The wink is that she delivers the thought as a quotable quote - proving her point while making it irresistible to repeat.