“the most remarkable piece of reading that you may be recommended to take and try if you can study is a book by Goethe—one of his last books, which he wrote when he was an old man, about seventy years of age—I think one of the most beautiful he ever wrote, full of mild wisdom, and which is found to be very touching by those who have eyes to discern and hearts to feel it. It is one of the pieces in "Wilhelm Meister's Travels." I read it through many years ago; and, of course, I had to read into it very hard when I was translating it (applause), and it has always dwelt in my mind as about the most remarkable bit of writing that I have known to be executed in these late centuries. I have often said, there are ten pages of that which, if ambition had been my only rule, I would rather have written than have written all the books that have appeared since I came into the world.”

— Thomas Carlyle

1860s, On The Choice Of Books (1866)

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Thomas Carlyle 481

Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian… 1795–1881

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

“Years ago I read a man named Machado de Assis who wrote a book called Dom Casmurro.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Machado de Assis is a South American writer — black father, Portuguese mother — writing in 1865, say. I thought the book was very nice. Then I went back and read the book and said, Hmm. I didn’t realize all that was in that book. Then I read it again, and again, and I came to the conclusion that what Machado de Assis had done for me was almost a trick: he had beckoned me onto the beach to watch a sunset. And I had watched the sunset with pleasure. When I turned around to come back in I found that the tide had come in over my head. That’s when I decided to write.
Paris Review Interview (1990)

“I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer died last year at the age of 84 years old. For the last 60 years of this man's life, he drank to excess every day. Uh, he was married six times. He smoked pot. He stabbed his second wife. And I've never read one of his books, but I gotta tell you I'm a huge fan.”

Ron White (1956) American comedian

Behavioral Problems

“In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice.”

Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) American writer, literary and social critic, and noted man of letters

The Triple Thinkers (1938) [Oxford University Press, 1948], Preface, p. ix

“No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books, either to discover or to control himself.”

Romain Rolland (1866–1944) French author

Source: Journey Within (1947), Ch. 2 : The Three Revelations
Context: No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books, either to discover or to control himself. And the most objective books are the most deceptive. The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest.