Quotes About Classic Books

#1. 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

#2. I have inherited fragrance of classic books. Drilling the wall for light, hair tied to a beam in fear of drowsing, I wrest from nature excellence in letters.

Lisa See

#3. It took me a long time to realise how many of our classic books on animals were by gay writers who wrote of their relationships with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak.

Helen Macdonald

#4. Not all of E. Nesbit's children's books are fantasies, but even the most realistic somehow seem magical. In her holiday world, nobody ever goes to school, though all the kids know their English history, Greek myths, and classic tales of derring-do.

Michael Dirda

#5. ...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

#6. 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

#7. Classics aren't books that are read for pleasure. Classics are books that are imposed on unwilling students, books that are subjected to analyses of "levels of significance" and other blatt, books that are dead.

Alexei Panshin

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

B.R. Myers

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

Moses Hadas

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

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

Augustine Of Hippo

#14. Many of the greatest books are like a forest. The best way to get to know them is to wander right into the middle and get lost.

Anthony Esolen

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. I'm the classic example of alienation: I grew up in a middle-class household without art or books. I was going to be a chemical engineer until I went to the theatre for the first time at 16 and was blown away by it.

Richard Eyre

#18. It could be said that a single person has written all the books in the world such central unity is in them that they are undeniably the work of a single all-knowing master.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Mark Twain

#20. '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

#21. 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

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

Aman Jassal

#23. What man can quote a scene from the 1939 film classic? That does not happen in real life, hell, it doesn't even happen in books. I halted hastily in the middle of the parking lot. Of course - it was obvious as a hooker at a debutant ball - Hunter. Was. Gay.

Genna Rulon

#24. 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

#25. Publishers, naturally, loathe used books and have developed strategies to depress the secondhand market. They bring out new, even more expensive editions of popular textbooks every three to four years, in a classic cycle of planned obsolescence.

James Surowiecki

#26. The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

Jane Austen

#27. He reached into the bag and drew out an odd array of manga, ripped paperbacks of books both classic and modern, and a small stack of crumpled magazines. See, I even brought some things to read aloud. I wasn't sure what you'd like, so there's a bit of everything.

Holly Black

#28. In the past, people generally believed they could acquire magic in two ways: through learning the craft, either from another practitioner or from books; or through obtaining magic from a powerful being-think Faust or the classic, demonized witch, both of whom get their mojo from Satan.

David Liss

#29. 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

#30. It's the witching hour once more-
When the Muse comes out to play.
He calls me through that magic door-
Where galaxies of worlds await!

Belle Whittington

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

Italo Calvino

#32. In a rich moonlit garden, flowers open beneath the eyes of entire nations terrified to acknowledge the simplicity of the beauty of peace.

Aberjhani

#33. Even though Chinese society was really closed, there were two windows for me to explore the world. One was from my mother and grandmother, the unseen and invisible world. Another window was brought from my father's side, those classic and Western books.

Cai Guo-Qiang

#34. A classic is read not to enjoy but only to be boast about it.

Aman Jassal

#35. There are so many classic Big Brother warning books: the Internet is a horrible, controlling thing, as if it has a consciousness or political agenda.

Joshua Cohen

#36. 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