Quotes About Literary Masterpieces

#1. It's certainly no secret that American students are taught less and less about the canonical literary masterpieces of the past, and there is no shortage of people who believe that what little they're required to learn in school is still too much.

Terry Teachout

#2. I hope the day will come when a wasp-waist and a pair of thin shoulders will not be esteemed beauty: we have had our ideas ruined by trash novels, praising 'fragile forms' and 'delicate beauty,' 'dainty waists,' 'snow-drop faces,' and a lot of other nonsense.

Julia McNair Wright

#3. I want you to need me but not half as much as I want you to want me.

Siobhan Davis

#4. The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.

Marshall McLuhan

#5. Many married women who have deliberately spurned the "hour" of childbearing are unhappy and frustrated. They never discovered the joys of marriage because they refused to surrender to the obligation of their state. In saving themselves, they lost themselves!

Fulton J. Sheen

#6. The Biblical stories are sacred inspiration.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#7. Perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.

Marcel Proust

#8. Know your literary tradition, savor it, steal from it, but when you sit down to write, forget about worshiping greatness and fetishizing masterpieces.

Allegra Goodman

#9. If you have a good script, that's what gets you involved. It's harder to write a good screenplay than to find something.

Bill Murray

#10. Symphony is the ability to see the big picture, connect the dots, combine disparate things into something new. Visual artists in particular are good at seeing how the pieces come together. I experienced this myself by trying to learn to draw.

Daniel H. Pink