LDS Church Publication Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

I would love to write something that people would still read 50 or 100 years from now. That comes with growing older, I think.

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.

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.

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

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.

'Classic.' A book which people praise and don't read.

When I read 'The Master', I felt that I had read a true classic. It's so rare nowadays that you have that feeling: it was a privilege to read it.

The good books stick around for a reason. There is a reason that we come back to them and they are so rewarding.

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

I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time

A "classic" is a book that everybody praises but nobody has read

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.

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

Only well-written works will descend to posterity. Fulness of knowledge, interesting facts, even useful inventions, are no pledge of immortality, for they may be employed by more skilful hands; they are outside the man; the style is the man himself.

I'm not really sure what makes a book a 'classic' to begin with, but I think it has to be at least fifty years old and some person or animal has to die at the end.

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 love books that stand the test of time.

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.