Virginia Woolf on reading

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

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