“In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.”

A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated (1894)

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Oscar Wilde812

Irish writer and poet 1854–1900

Benjamin Fish Austin (1850–1933) Nineteenth-century Canadian educator/Methodist Minister/Spiritualist

Sermon (1899)

“Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”

Henry David Thoreau book Walden ou la vie dans les bois

Source: Walden

“Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Private Reading, p. 152.
A History of Reading (1996)

“The shelves of books we haven't written, like those of books we haven't read, stretches out into the darkness of the universal library's farthest space. We are always at the beginning of the beginning of the letter A.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Endpaper Pages, p. 309.
A History of Reading (1996)

“Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read-ultimately you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books.”

Sören Kierkegaard book Stages on Life's Way

Stages on Life's Way, 1845 p. 363-364
1840s, Stages on Life's Way (1845)

“I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.”

Barbara Kingsolver (1955) American author, poet and essayist

“A scholar is like a book written in a dead language — it is not every one that can read in it.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"Common Places," No. 13, The Literary Examiner (September - December 1823)

“For all the books in his possession, he still failed to read the stories written plain as day in the faces of the people around him.”

Emma Donoghue (1969) Irish novelist, playwright, short-story writer and historian

Source: Slammerkin

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

“Books, books, books. It was not that I read so much. I read and re-read the same ones. But all of them were necessary to me. Their presence, their smell, the letters of their titles, and the texture of their leather bindings.”

Colette (1873–1954) 1873-1954 French novelist: wrote Gigi

“In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.”

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