Aldous Huxley on reading

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can’t be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?

To us, the moment 8:17 A.M. means something⁠—something very important, if it happens to be the starting time of our daily train. To our ancestors, such an odd eccentric instant was without significance⁠—did not even exist. In inventing the locomotive, Watt and Stevenson were part inventors of time.

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

Mark Twain1835–1910Quoting 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. 194

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Mark Twain1835–1910

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin1706–1790

• Writing