Mark Twain1835–1910A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Quoting or paraphrasing a Professor Winchester in “Disappearance of Literature”, speech at the Nineteenth Century Club, New York, 20 November 1900, in Mark Twain’s Speeches (1910), ed. William Dean Howells, p. 194The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Chapter XVIIIn context
