Wilfrid Sheed Quotes

There's nothing like taking Proust to the beach and daydreaming along to it.

Wilbur Smith's novels make terrific holiday reading.

If you're looking for a book that's not been influenced by 21st century popular culture and that's guaranteed to be a good read because it's stood the test of time, you can't go wrong with the classics.

I myself love to read those Victorian novels which go on and on, and you don't read them in one sitting. You might read one over the course of a summer, but that isn't what I want to write.

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

I do realize that I am a popular writer who people buy to take on vacation. I'm an escapist kind of writer.

I never understood the concept of a fluffy summer read. For me, summer reading means beaches, long train rides and layovers in foreign airports. All of which call for escaping into really long books.

Now that I'm taking some time off from school, I've been reading a lot to make sure I don't forget everything. It's mostly classics and nonfiction accounts from actors, directors and writers from the '40s and '50s.

I would only read the novels that people classify as 'beach books' if I were being held prisoner and the only alternative was the 'Book of Mormon.'

My summer reading suggestion: Pick a really famous, really long novel.

From time to time there is a move to do a little less in the way of period dramas, but people rebel. Audiences say we want them. There is a big hunger for them. I don't think it's sentimentality or nostalgia, it's often that they are simply the best stories.

I'm not going to give quotes about inventing the 'beach book,' but I was certainly at the forefront of it.

A really great popcorn movie is extremely hard to pull off. A really great popcorn book is equally hard to pull off, so I don't feel guilty devouring one.

There's a lot of fiction from that period that we're nostalgic for.

I'd much prefer my books to shoes...In the summer I sometimes take walks without shoes but never without a novel.

Favorite books and authors while growing up - I'd need a book to list them all. For the sake of brevity: Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, Victor Hugo, world's mythology, the Arthurian legends. And the unabridged dictionary. And they're still my favorites. They get better each time I read them.

I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.

Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.

To my mind that literature is best and most enduring which is characterized by a noble simplicity.

The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to construct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the others like a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time.

A classic is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion.

There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.

The classic literature is always modern.

In the classics section, she had picked up a copy of The Magic Mountain and recalled the summer between her junior and senior years of high school, when she read it, how she lay in bed hours after she should have gotten up, the sheet growing warmer against her skin as the sun rose higher in the sky, her mother poking her head in now and then to see if she'd gotten up yet, but never suggesting that she should: Eleanor didn't have many rules about child rearing, but one of them was this: Never interrupt reading.

I think Austin is read more now than Charles Dickens, and Dickens was much more popular in his day. She endures because of her classicism.