Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really com...es: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a sto...ry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Narrowed-down by her early editors and anthologists, reduced to quaintness or spinsterish oddity by many of her commentators, sent...imentalized, fallen-in-love with like some gnomic Garbo, still unread in the breadth and depth of her full range of work, she was, and is, a wonder to me when I try to imagine myself into that mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What avail all your scholarly accomplishments and learning, compared with wisdom and manhood? To omit his other behavior, see what... a work this comparatively unread and unlettered man wrote within six weeks. Where is our professor of belles-lettres, or of logic and rhetoric, who can write so well?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »