Classic Book Quotes

#1. I feel there's nothing like a good classic book, except possibly its movie version.

George Kohlman

#2. Not every classic book was the best thing ever. Each book has flaws, and it's up to writers to change things.

Tim Holtorf

#3. I think I read Susan Brownmiller's classic book called "Femininity" when I was about 16. So yeah, it's been part of my mindset since a very early age. To me, what's crucial is to tell women's stories but also to tell them in a way that is fearless.

Emma Donoghue

#4. A classic book is a book which generations of men, driven by various reasons, read with that same initial fervor and that same mysterious loyalty.

Jorge Luis Borges

#5. The instant you say All Quiet On The Western Front people remember that great 20th century classic book on war, a book about a school boy turned into a soldier overnight.

Ann Widdecombe

#6. By the nature of cinema and how it literalizes what we envision, movies can have difficulty replicating that connection we make with a classic book.

Steve Erickson

#7. What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.

Lawrence Clark Powell

#8. Perhaps a book becomes a classic in proportion to how broadly its characters can be scavenged, how many readers find within it something they experience as desirable or even intimately necessary.

Janna Malamud Smith

#9. I don't spend much on clothes. I buy old books. I tell myself I ought to save - it's the classic Northern work ethic. I like good holidays, though. I'm a big fan of cruises. I love unpacking once and having the scenery change every day.

Alan Titchmarsh

#10. Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

Alan Bennett

#11. What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It's like a metaphor for life. You set off from home, and in the classic travel book, you go to an unknown place. You discover a different world, and you discover yourself.

Paul Theroux

#12. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books which he has merely skimmed, lapping at them, as the classic proverb puts it; "As the dogs drink of Nilus." Little learning and much pride come of hasty reading.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#13. Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I'll waste no time reading it.

Moses Hadas

#14. Every new book we read in our brief and busy lives means that a classic is left unread.

B.R. Myers

#15. I lived through a classic publishing story. My editor was fired a month before the book came out. The editor who took it over already had a full plate. It was never advertised. We didn't get reviewed in any major outlets.

Anita Diament

#16. The character I play has all these revolutionary ideas. I think the classic thing is that majority people who are criticising it probably have never read the books, and need to. And I'm sure that the Catholic Church, which is being directed as you know, can handle it.

Daniel Craig

#17. A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.

Italo Calvino

#18. I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.

Per Petterson

#19. The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.

Augustine Of Hippo

#20. I just signed to do my next book with Ecco Press, a new primer or encyclopedia. This will be my take on what classic Italian cooking is.

Mario Batali

#21. I'm not really sure what makes a book a 'classic' to begin with, but I think it has to be at least fifty years old and some person or animal has to die at the end.

Jeff Kinney

#22. Many a young wizard has tried to read a grimoire that is too strong for him, and people who've heard the screams have found only his pointy shoes with the classic wisp of smoke coming out of them and a book which is, perhaps, just a little fatter.

Terry Pratchett

#23. Exhaustively researched and beautifully written, Cronkite is a classic. Douglas Brinkley has written his best book yet. This is a fascinating story that will be read for years to come.

Debby Applegate

#24. I couldn't read. I just scraped by. My solution back then was to read classic comic books because I could figure them out from the context of the pictures. Now I listen to books on tape.

Charles R. Schwab

#25. I think the book struck me in a few ways that I thought very interesting to pick it as my first martial arts film. It has a very strong female character and it was very abundant in classic Chinese textures.

Ang Lee

#26. A "classic" is a book that everybody praises but nobody has read

Mark Twain

#27. This is a book that respects kids and their ideas. And in that regard, it places Chasing Vermeer in the tradition of classic favorites fondly recalled from our own childhoods.

Elizabeth Taylor

#28. A cult classic ... both a celebration of the unlimited potential of the comic book form, and a perfect melding of inspiring, iconoclastic imaginations.

Jim Jarmusch

#29. 'Classic' - a book which people praise and don't read.

Mark Twain

#30. ...because there's a secret order. The books, you can't place them random. The other day I put Cervantes next to Tolstoj.
And I thought, if close to Anna Karenina we have Don Quixote, sure the latter will do his best to save her.

Ettore Scola

#31. I had thought for years, probably 30 or 40 years, that it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at a classic English mystery novel ... I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book.

Alan Bradley

#32. A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.

W.E.B. Du Bois

#33. A classic is a book that survives the circumstances that made it possible yet alone keeps those circumstances alive.

Alfred Kazin

#34. I have a screened in porch, and it's nice to curl up with a book outside when it's raining, especially an old battered classic like 'Pride & Prejudice & Zombies.'

Amanda Hocking

#35. I read everything. I've always got a book on the go and I'm really nerdy about it, I get through books and don't remember anything about them afterwards. But I read all sorts, from classic to contemporary.

Rebecca Hall

#36. Once you read a classic, you will start loving even the smell of the books.

Aman Jassal

#37. When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.

Clifton Fadiman

#38. A book doesn't have to be a literary classic, of course, to change us forever.

Pico Iyer

#39. I heard a story the other night about an editor who visited the Iowa Workshop and, when asked what sorts of books she published, replied, "Classic books." One of the students asked her, "You mean like Kafka?" Apparently she said, "Oh, I don't think I would publish Kafka."

Matthew Specktor

#40. I first got really interested in Noh in about 1977. There was an independent bookstore in Bloomington, Indiana where I was going to high school. It was a really nice place. There was a New Directions paperback. It was the Pound/Fenollosa book, 'The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan.'

William T. Vollmann

#41. A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

Italo Calvino

#42. ("A classic is a book that remains in print" - Mark Van Doren)

Thomas Merton

#43. It's absurd to think of 'Pride and Prejudice,' this classic, beloved book, beset with a zombie uprising. The goal is to make you suspend your disbelief enough to allow you to get lost in the story and believe what you're reading for a while.

Seth Grahame-Smith

#44. A classic,' suggested Anthony, 'is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#45. The author says one character's definition of a classic is any book he'd heard of before he was thirty.

Sinclair Lewis

#46. It was cliche, he knew, but he meant it classic.

S.E. Hinton

#47. The young man never seemed to know what idleness was," marveled Cutler, "and every leisure moment would find the last novel, some English classic or some abstruse book on natural history in his hands.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#48. 'First Light' has gotten a reputation as a kind of cult classic about science. I never really intended it to be read as a science book, but books, like children, have a way of choosing their own friends.

Richard Preston

#49. You had to admire a guy who called his own new book a classic before it was published and anyone else had a chance to read it.

William Goldman

#50. A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

Italo Calvino

#51. The Princess Bride
S. Morgenstern's
Classic Tale of True Love
and High Adventure
You had to admire a guy who called his own new book a classic before it was published and anyone had a chance to read it.

William Goldman

#52. As I work, I see my writing - each scene, each chapter, each section, each book - in three-act structures and classic myths, and I analyze them through the handy filter of the detective story.

Nick Harkaway

#53. We have an agreement," she explained. "I watch nothing to do with a hobbit, Vulcan, or comic book hero, and in return, Dexter's not forced to sit through a foreign romance, a BBC production, or one my classic films.

Kristin Billerbeck

#54. Art is bad when 'you see the intent and get put off.' (Goethe) In Tolstoy one is unaware of the intent, and sees only the thing itself.
from the book, On Retranslating A Russian Classic Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Joel Carmichael

#55. A new acquaintance is like a new book. I prefer it, even if bad, to a classic.

Benjamin Disraeli