John Masefield Quotes

The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.

Writers who used to show off their erudition no longer sing in the bare ruined choir of the media.

After the advent of the written word, the masses who could not - or were not permitted to - read, were given sermons by the few who could.

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches — nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.

the day Johannes Gutenberg finished his wooden printing press in 1440. Western civilization turned onto a path toward more efficient, accessible communication of knowledge.]

If you think about it, the printing press allowed everyone to print books - it democratised the printing of information. For the first time, we could all print.

The book has had a good run. For 550 years, it was the most practical way to deliver writing to multiple readers.

The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as the great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions.

Your library teacher would say, "What happens to a generation that doesn't read the Classics?" Me, I'm not your library teacher. But I have some of the same questions and concerns, you know?

The invention of the printing press was one of the most important events in human history.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

I still carry the residue of the pressure I felt as a child to read and appreciate the right books. Growing up, I never allowed myself to read beach reading. I was always plowing through Ford Madox Ford's 'Good Solider' or something I wasn't equipped to understand.

The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.

It seems inevitable that the magic of the written word will fade.

My parents were both storytellers. They always spoke with metaphorical richness.

The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.

I would never want a book's autograph. I am a proud non-reader of books.

Writing preserves only the thought of literate peoples.

Before books, nothing got saved. We don’t know what the cavemen thought about caves even though they tried to write on the walls.

Some of the most learned of the people were chosen to make known the lives of those lords in songs.

There are people out there who will not read books, but somehow they'll read my books.

The printing press did something really big for the world when everyone could get books in their hands and read.

The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.

You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp.