READING AS INTELLECTUAL INDOLENCE
Do I boast of my omnivorousness of reading, even apart from romances? Certainly no!—never, except in joke. It's against my theories and ratiocinations, which take upon themselves to assert that we all generally err by reading too much, or out of proportion to what we think. I should be wiser, I am persuaded, if I had not read half as much—should have had stronger and better exercised faculties. The fact is, that the ne plus ultra of intellectual indolence is this reading of books. It comes next to what the Americans call 'whittling'.—E. B. Browning (Letter to R. H. Horne).