How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/pw/mrlear.html, st. 1 (1871).
“Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him?”
Interview with Christian Salmon (Fall 1983), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Series Seven [Viking, 1988, ], pp. 217-218
Context: Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
Law.
Table Talk (1689)
Letter to Henry James (ca. 1890) as quoted by Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2007) p. 297. Also as quoted partially by Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925) p. 2.
1890s
Miscellaneous
Source: https://books.google.ca/books?id=ww3ikzftnNsC&pg=PA82&dq=it%27s+dangerous+to+know+how+to+read+and+not+how+to+interpret+what+you%27re+reading&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjOssCd-cr0AhWSHc0KHTQvDuQQ6AF6BAgCEAI#v=onepage&q=it's%20dangerous%20to%20know%20how%20to%20read%20and%20not%20how%20to%20interpret%20what%20you're%20reading&f=false Ebony September 1995
“A man who can’t read only knows what other folks tell him.”
Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Seventh Son (1987), Chapter 15.
The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
“Show him every dawn & read to him endlessly.”
Source: Letters of Ted Hughes
