Directory of Mark Twain's maxims, quotations, and various opinions:

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READING

I don't believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic... something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
- "Disappearance of Literature" speech

I do not read anything but history and biography. You perceive that for me to presume to indicate the hundred authors which a person ought to read, would be folly. No, leave me out: My testimony would not be valuable.
- letter to Joseph B. Gilder, 5/16/1886

I have no liking for novels or stories--none in the world; and so, whenever I read one--which is not oftener than once in two years, and even in these same cases I seldom read beyond the middle of the book--my distaste for the vehicle always taints my judgment of the literature itself, as a matter of course; and also of course makes my verdict valuless. Are you saying "You have written stories yourself." Quite true: but the fact that an Indian likes to scalp people is no evidence that he likes to be scalped.
- letter to Bruce Weston Munro, 3/15/1887

It is so unsatisfactory to read a noble passage and have no one you love at hand to share the happiness with you. And it is unsatisfactory to read to one's self anyhow--for the uttered voice so heightens the expression.
- My Father Mark Twain, Clara Clemens

Don't explain your author, read him right and he explains himself.
- Letter to letter to Cordelia Welsh Foote of Cincinnati, 12/2/1887. Reprinted in When Huck Finn Went Highbrow, Casseres

Misattributed quote: The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. - In Nice Guys Finish Seventh, (1992) by Ralph Keyes: "Abby Van Buren once made this observation in her advice column. A reader said she should have credited the thought to Mark Twain. Abby apologized, explaining that she genuinely thought the idea was her own. Perhaps it was. Although this saying is often attributed to Twain, no one has ever confirmed that he said it" (p. 111). However, a subsequent researcher reports finding the quote in a newspaper, The Chicago Heights Star, Chicago, Illinois, 1 Feb 1949, as a stand alone quote attributed to Mark twain. This places it much earlier than "Dear Abby," but with no acceptable confirmation of source.

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