Source: The Paris Review interview (1981), p. 31
“It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.”
Algernon, Act I
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
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Oscar Wilde 812
Irish writer and poet 1854–1900Related quotes
Letter to Abigail Adams (28 December 1794), Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society
1790s
Source: Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife
“We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.”
As quoted in B. F. Skinner : The Man and His Ideas (1968) by Richard Isadore Evans, p. 73.
Context: We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.
“Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.”
Source: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
As quoted in Alice James, Her Brothers — Her Journal (1934).
Introduction
Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)