“I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”
Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist
High Life below Stairs (1759), Act ii, Scene 1.
“I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”
Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist
Rick Cook (1944) American writer
The Wizardry Cursed (1991)
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
“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
“I want leisure to read—an immense amount.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter
Source: The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Jane Austen book Northanger Abbey
Variant: The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid
Source: "Northanger Abbey" (1817)