Amanda Foreman Quotes

'Tom Sawyer' could have been written eight months ago, with the kind of response it still gets.

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

I'm not interested in creating a book that is read once and then placed on the shelf and forgotten.

When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as 'Catch-22' I'm tempted to reply, 'Who has?'

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.

The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.

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

Only a few things are worth a second reading—rarely are things of such enduring quality that they are read many times and live to inspire a second or third generation.

I think Bellow's the greatest American writer of his century, personally. When I read him, I'm in awe.

Reading it now for the seventh or eighth time, I am more convinced than ever not merely that The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s masterwork but that it is the American masterwork, the finest work of fiction by any of this country’s writers.

For the record, I have long suspected that my favorite book is actually 'Charlotte's Web.'

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

Reading 'Moby-Dick' was really a sort of transformative literary experience for me.

'The Divine Comedy' is very sophisticated but also very popular.

I've reread 'The Secret Garden' every year as an adult. I have a battered copy on my bookshelf - it's really quite a mess! The experience of reading the novel keeps deepening for me.

The sacred books of all the world are worthless dross and common stones compared with Shakespeare's glittering gold and gleaming gems.

There's never a false note in a Berg novel.

I only got 'War and Peace' on the third attempt.

Introductions, that is, belong to the masterpieces and classics of the world, to the great and ancient and accepted things; and I am here introducing a short, small story of my own which appeared in The Evening News about ten months ago.

I've been fortunate in that I never actually read any Jane Austen until I was thirty, thus sparing myself several decades of the unhappiness of having no new Jane Austen novels to read.

Ulysses could have done with a good editor. You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.

Nathaniel Philbrick's 'In the Heart of the Sea' has rightfully taken its place as a classic for its literary merits. It has a special place in the cannibalism canon as well.

My go-to author for knowing it all is Evelyn Waugh. 'A Handful of Dust' is as perfect as a book can get.

I sometimes feel that if your book sells more than 20 years, then there's something in it that you can say, gee, I did something that endures, that's timeless.