Lawrence Clark Powell Quotes

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

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

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

The newest books are those that never grow old.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Most great plays of the past lose their grip on immediacy; on application to our lives right now.

I just hope that some of the movies I'm in are still welcome years from now.

The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.

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.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Literature is news that stays news.

In 1970, somebody once asked me whether I thought my books would still be around in 40 years, and I thought, 'How would I know, and why would I care?' Well, it turns out I really do care.

Shakespeare wrote about what was happening during the time; it still relates to us now.

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

Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.

The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.

When I'm dead, I wanna leave a body of work, like authors or great painters do. I don't wanna get ideas above my station, but why shouldn't this be comparable? Pop music was supposed to be a flash in the pan, but here we are 50 years later, and it means something to us, and it always will do. It's incredibly important.

To be appreciated by a whole 'nother generation of fans, all of a sudden discovering you, it's kind of what I did with the classic bands I love - the ones that influenced me.

There's a reason you can still read Thucydides, and it still makes sense to you thousands of years later.