Archibald MacLeish on reading

The one man who should never attempt an explanation on poetry is its author. If the poem can be improved by its author’s explanations, it never should have been published.

A poem should not mean
But be.

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.

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