Remy de Gourmont Quotes

Few books today are forgivable.

There are only two kinds of books -- good books and the others. The good are winnowed from the bad through the democracy of time.

If a book really wants the patronage of a great name, it is a bad book; and if it be a good book, it wants it not.

Nine-tenths of all existing books are nonsense.

A book cannot easily be too bad for the general public, but may easily be too good.

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

What makes a good book? Scholars and critics have been debating that question for decades. I like books that touch my head and my heart at the same time.

Good books get praised, bad books get praised. Good books get ignored, bad books get ignored

I honestly don't think Peter is that interesting without Harriet - the only exception being 'The Nine Tailors', which is such a good book it doesn't really matter whether he's got a consort or not.

To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

There are good books and there are bad books, period, that's the distinction.

Most books are three-thirds rubbish.

There's no literary merit in my books.

The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find you can't, it might not be your inadequacy that's to blame. 'Good' books can be pretty awful sometimes.

People never read my books for the quality of the documentary value.

if a book is not good enough for a grownup, it is not good enough for a child.

There never yet have been, nor are there now, too many good books.

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.

[Preface to second edition:] ... I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

It doesn't really matter what "genre" your book is. What matters is that it's a good book of its kind. Whatever that kind may be.

Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good' book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error.

I want people to read good work. If I see someone reading a book by Lorrie Moore or Jennifer Egan, I'm psyched. If I see them reading X Latin American Writer Who Sucks, I'm not psyched. But in terms of news, I do think that's important.