Ruskin Bond Quotes

It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.

A writer's definitive death is when no one reads his books anymore. That's the final death.

History proves that most writers get forgotten anyway. That's very likely to happen to my books, and if I'm extremely lucky, maybe one of my books will survive.

Government rules the present. Literature rules the future.

All of the great writers whom I admire have died. I guess the most recent one would be Marquez.

A writer's ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years' time and for one reader in a hundred years' time.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.

The first writers are first and the rest, in the long run, nowhere but in anthologies.

Literature is news that stays news.

Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology works.

Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.

When I think about my legacy, I think about the world that we leave behind for our children.

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

I want to contribute to the culture and keep great writers alive by telling the stories of their lives.

Like everyone else, I am going to die. But the words - the words live on for as long as there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them. It is immortality by proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered.

We know the future will outlast all of us, but I believe that all of us will live on in the future we made.

Chekhov was as important to me as anybody as a writer.

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.

I always loved to read, and I wanted to be part of the project of literature. My physical longevity is due to luck, and my literary longevity is due to my physical longevity.

If there's one thing I've written that could survive into posterity, I'd want that to be the poetry.

I want to build a legacy.

It's totally appropriate to be anxious about the future of things you care about, especially in a shifting world. But I've every expectation that literature will continue to exist.

There is certainly no one 'type' of writer who deliberately draws on Shakespeare. In fact, there's a strong argument that everyone writing in the English language is influenced by Shakespeare because, to a considerable degree, he shaped that language.