Aimee Bender Quotes

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

Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about.

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.

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

I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.

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

Shakespeare wrote about what was happening during the time; it still relates to us now.

I think about Shakespeare. Because there have been hundreds of variations of Shakespeare's plays since they've been written, and I believe it's because they're important. They're still relevant today. 'Roots' is still relevant today. The idea that we shouldn't tell this story again is very strange to me.

It is usual to speak in a playfully apologetic tone about one's adult enjoyment of what are called 'children's books.' I think the convention a silly one. No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty-except, of course, books of information. The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all. A mature palate will probably not much care for crème de menthe: but it ought still to enjoy bread and butter and honey.

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

Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.

I don't read a great deal of fiction, to my shame, other than the classics.

Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.

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

The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.

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

Sometimes novels are considered 'important' in the way medicine is - they taste terrible and are difficult to get down your throat, but are good for you.

The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.

Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of the ages through which they have passed.

Shakespeare and his work will always be relevant. He wrote those pieces hundreds of years ago and we haven't really changed as humans, have we? We have to deal with love, honour and adultery now - people were the same then, too - that's what's so wonderful and powerful.

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.

I want my books to last, to stand the test of time, and to do that I focus on the forces that shape the subject - the cultural and sociological geography - to capture them in a way that will explain them no matter what they are doing.

Books guided my life from high school, and the greatest, most interesting, most provocative, funniest, smartest people who ever lived in the last 200 or 300 years wrote those books. I would fall in love with Victor Hugo and read not just 'Les Miserables,' but 'Bug-Jargal' and 'The Toilers of the Sea' and so forth.

Literature is news that stays news.

I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.