W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes

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

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.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

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

People are starting to refer to 'The Giver' as a classic, but I don't know how that is defined. But if it means that 10, 20, 50 years from now kids will still be reading it, that is kind of awe-inspiring.

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

One of the greatest things about writing as a profession is that the words of Tolstoy, Chesterton and Dostoyevsky have lived for a hundred years and are just as powerful today. Their words have changed me just as much as the people I actually met.

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

As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are written. Both 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' were complete failures, critically and commercially, when they first appeared.

I definitely don't aspire to writing that's 'timeless,' whatever that means.

Most of the literary classics are worth reading, if you've nothing better to do.

I developed a prejudice in high school that it was all going to be boring. That kind of teenage, why-do-I-have-to-read-these-goddamn-classics feeling. And then you discover that the classics are classics because they're lively. They don't stick around because they're boring. If they're boring, they go away.

When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as 'Catch-22' I'm tempted to reply, 'Who has?'

I've tried not to treat Shakespeare as a marble giant.

Men there have been who have done the essayist's part so well as to have earned an immortality in the doing; but we have had not many of them, and they make but a poor figure on our shelves. It is a pity that things should be thus with us, for a good essayist is the pleasantest companion imaginable.

Read the writers whose work is still around and has survived the winds of fashion and the attacks of the ignorant and the bigoted - read everything you can get your hands on.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

Literature is news that stays news.

Books that have become classics - books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal - always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.

There's one good kind of writer - a dead one.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

Only a few things are worth a second reading—rarely are things of such enduring quality that they are read many times and live to inspire a second or third generation.

I see 'Eligible' as a homage, and I see 'Pride and Prejudice' as a perfect book. You can dispute whether this project is a good idea, but you can't dispute my fondness for the novel.

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

There's a history of English literature where the best boils to the top, and Jane Austen stands right at the top of that.