Jonathan Yardley Quotes

'The Great Gatsby,' by F. Scott Fitzgerald, remains the most perfect novel that has ever come out of the United States. Everything in the book moves as it should, in the manner of a piece by Bach or Mozart.

Frank Baum knew at once he had written something special when he completed 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.'

I have several books I can read over and over. With fiction, it's 'The Stand' by Stephen King, which is my favorite all time. I read that at least once a year, the version which has 100,000 extra words, which is like the director's cut and unabridged. I love the story. I love the social connotation to it.

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.

Whatever was said about Ralph Ellison, 'Invisible Man' was considered untouchable.

READING, n. The general body of what one reads. In our country it consists, as a rule, of Indiana novels, short stories in "dialect" and humor in slang.

No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.

Mark Twain was an artist working at the highest level. He wrote a book, his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that put America on the world stage for literature. It's almost as if, if you start reading that book as a racist, you cannot finish it and still be a racist.

You can't not like 'The Great Gatsby.' It's got the best sentences in, like, ever.

I developed a mania for Fitzgerald - by the time I'd graduated from high school I'd read everything he'd written. I started with 'The Great Gatsby' and moved on to 'Tender Is the Night,' which just swept me away. Then I read 'This Side of Paradise,' his novel about Princeton - I literally slept with that book under my pillow for two years.

I didn't read The Haunting of Hill House until sometime early in the 1990's.

For me, Fitzgerald was one of the great American writers of the last century; a wordsmith, a storyteller, a perfectionist.

Ford Maddox Ford's 'The Good Soldier' is my favourite novel. I first read it in the 1950s and have read it about 20 times since. It's possibly the best-constructed book in the English language.

I love to read. I was in AP English in high school, and we were assigned books every few months. 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' are two of my favorite ones.

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

'Great Expectations' is one of the greatest stories.

There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.

They needed someone to write a script of The Great Gatsby very quickly for the movie they were making. I took this job so I'd be sure to have some dough to support my family.

Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.

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

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

When you think about 'The Grapes of Wrath,' it's an American masterpiece, and a very long process goes into the making of such a book.

'Of Mice and Men,' Steinbeck's fifth novel, adheres to a simple dramatic structure, which observes the classic Aristotelian unities of time, place and action.

Tarjei Vesaas has written the best Norwegian novel ever, 'The Birds' - it is absolutely wonderful: the prose is so simple and so subtle, and the story is so moving that it would have been counted amongst the great classics from the last century if it had been written in one of the major languages.

The great thing about America is I always come back with more books and more tip-offs of who to read. It's a country in love with crime fiction.