Reading glasses rest on an open book atop a small stack of worn books beside a vase of dried stems.

Original artwork, not a still

Mark Twain

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

Behind the line

What it means

Our interpretation.

A book earns the label 'classic' when everyone wants credit for having read it yet nobody wants to do the reading. The quip skewers cultural pretension, suggesting that reverence for great works is often a matter of reputation and appearances rather than real reading.

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