Wittgenstein in those days often warned us against readin...

Wittgenstein in those days often warned us against reading philosophical books. If we took a book seriously, he would say, it ought to puzzle us so much that we would throw it across the room and think about the problem for ourselves.

He had he said, only once been to high table at Trinity and the clever conversation of the dons had so horrified him that he had come out with both hands over his ears. The dons talked like that only to score: they did not even enjoy doing it. He said his own bedmaker's conversation, about he private lives of her previous gentlemen and about her own family, was far preferable: at least he could understand why she talked that way and could believe she enjoyed it.

He liked the north of England, too: when he asked the bus conductor on a Newcastle bus where to get off for a certain cinema, the conductor at once told him it was a bad film there and he ought to go to another. And this started a heated argument on thus bus as to which film Wittgenstein ought to see and why. He liked that: it was the sort of thing that would have happened in Austria.

From Karl Britton's 'Portrait of a Philosopher', his memories of Wittgenstein