Anne Fadiman Quotes

It doesn't matter that your painting is small. Kopecks are also small, but when a lot are put together they make a ruble. Each painting displayed in a gallery and each good book that makes it into a library, no matter how small they may be, serve a great cause: accretion of the national wealth.

Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.

If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.

You invest into the future, and that's how young people become human in best sense of it - through the great experience of listening a Müller symphony or to see a great play by Tennessee Williams, experience something in a ballet, in a film.

There's no connection between consumption of art and moral stamina at all.

I think once you sort of cross over and you realize what books can be - and if they mean something to you - there's just no stopping you.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.

And as for me, thogh that I can but lyte, On bakes for to rede I me delyte, And to hem yeve I feyth and ful credence, And in myn herte have hem in reverence So hertely, that ther is game noon, That fro my bokes maketh me to goon, But hit be seldom, on the holyday; Save, certeynly, when that the month of May Is comen, and that I here the foules singe, And that the floures ginnen for to springe, Farwel my book and my devocion.

Keep in mind that books, like art museums, are not always geared to the desires of the reader.

We live for books.

How can you tell? That I like books, I mean. The look on your face when you walked in, somehow I doubted you were that impressed by me.

Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.

[When] he's here, he's always reading. He says books stop time. I myself think he's crazy...Don't tell anyone, but when he reads something that he likes he gets real happy, turns on the music, and dances by himself, or with a broom sometimes.

If people don't read, that's their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.

Don't stop now. Go ahead! Be readers all of your lives. And don't forget, librarians and teachers can help you find the right books to read.

A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.

And if out of a million visitors there is even one to whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums.

There are only three forms of high art: the symphony, the illustrated children's book and the board game.

I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on, from “Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-a-While” to “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn’t nearly so important; it comes in its own time.

Thou shalt not let a day pass without rereading something great.

Life is too short to live with any but the greatest books.

There's a whole generation growing up thinking you shouldn't seek knowledge for its own sake, and that theatre and art and books are activities that you do after-hours, rather than things that are at the heart of life. That's a huge change.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise.