Joseph Brodsky Quotes

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

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

In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics.

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.

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

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.

People are starting to refer to 'The Giver' as a classic, but I don't know how that is defined. But if it means that 10, 20, 50 years from now kids will still be reading it, that is kind of awe-inspiring.

I think Jane Austen is like Shakespeare, in a slightly different way. I think people will continue to revisit these stories because they remain relevant, regardless of how you do them.

A shelf of classics for our young adults: Tolkien, Hesse, Casteneda, Kerouac, Salinger, Tom Robbins, and _The Last Whole Earth Catalog_.

A classic is a book that remains in print

If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver's Travels among them.

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.

My grandfather had a proper bookcase of egghead books, and he gave them to me in alphabetical order. So we moved from Aeschylus to the Brontas, and I can still remember the great relief of going from the dipus cycle to Jane Eyre.

What's wonderful about Tolkien and Shakespeare is that they show up your own individual microscope. They're so infinitely vast. You can reinterpret them in so many ways.

I do believe that the genre reached its peak before the First World War.

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.

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

Negative books can be bestsellers, but seldom classics.

When a new book is published, read an old one.

People would react to books by authors like James and Austen almost on a gut level. I think it was not so much the message, because the best authors do not have obvious messages. These authors were disturbing to my students because of their perspectives on life.

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

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

I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.

I'd somehow always thought of the classics of literature as something apart from me, something to do with academic life and not something you enjoyed.

The newest books are those that never grow old.