John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States
Letter to Abigail Adams (28 December 1794), Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society
1790s
Source: Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife
"I am a Book I neither Wrote nor Read"
Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (1959)
John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States
Letter to Abigail Adams (28 December 1794), Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society
1790s
Source: Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife
Elliot Rodger (1991–2014) American spree killer
My Twisted World (2014), 19-22, UC Santa Barbara, Racial Superiority
“The only reason I read a book is because I cannot see and converse with the man who wrote it.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)
Speech in Kansas City (12 May 1905), PWW (The Papers of Woodrow Wilson) 16:99
Unsourced variant: I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.
1900s
Dante Alighieri book Inferno
Canto V, lines 127–138 (tr. Mandelbaum).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Inferno
“I am living permanently in my dream, from which I make brief forays into reality.”
Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker
Source: Images: My Life in Film
“Reading and sauntering and lounging and dosing, which I call thinking, is my supreme Happiness.”
David Hume (1711–1776) Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer
"Lincoln and the Priests of Academe"
1990s, United States - Essays 1952-1992 (1992)
David Irving (1938) British writer and Holocaust denier
David Irving's Talk to the Clarendon Club http://www.fpp.co.uk/speeches/speech190992.html