Classic Novel Quotes

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.

'The Hobbit' was one of the first biggish books I ever read. I remember vividly the 'riddles in the dark' passage, and it meant a lot to me to finally get to play it after all these years.

When I was 5 years old, my mother read me 'Gone With The Wind' at night, before I went to bed. I remember her reading almost all year.

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

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

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

Mark Twain's Roughing It is a book that many people don't know about, but I highly recommend to anybody at any age.

The Great Gatsby' [...] was my 'Tom Sawyer' when I was twelve [....]

After I won the Newbery Medal for 'From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,' children all over the world let me know that they liked books that take them to unusual places where they meet unusual people.

When I was 10 years old, I loved - I loved books, and I used to haunt the secondhand bookshop. And I found a little book I could just afford, and I bought it, and I took it home. And I climbed up my favorite tree, and I read that book from cover to cover. And that was Tarzan of the Apes. I immediately fell in love with Tarzan.

By the time I was 10 or 12, I had discovered the lure of the romance genre - and the dusty copy of 'The Thorn Birds' on my parents' bookshelf.

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.

Everyone knows 'Little Women.' Most women love it if they've read it. If they haven't, they might love the movie, or they've heard of it.

I have always loved 'Stig of the Dump.' I think reading that book made me officially realise that I was a reader.

I've read 'Valley of the Dolls' at least four times. It's so epic!

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

I just downloaded '1984' for my iPod, but I've read that before. It just hearkens back to the 'romance' of my high-school days. I really liked the space I was in when I was reading it.

I was not familiar with the book [before filming in The Outsiders] , though. Interestingly, The Outsiders had not reached the point where it is now, where it's required reading in sixth and seventh grades. In my sixth and seventh grade, we did not, but today everyone does.

'Parable of the Sower' is capital-I Important. Put it on the literary fiction shelf. Put it on the Holy Crap fiction shelf. Put it on every shelf. This is one of the all-time great American novels.

I mark the reading of 'Look Homeward, Angel' as one of the pivotal events of my life. It starts off with the single greatest, knock-your-socks-off first page I have ever come across in my careful reading of world literature.

Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time.

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

I would have loved to play Atticus in 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' There's no music in it, but it doesn't mean I wouldn't want to do it!

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

The instant you say All Quiet On The Western Front people remember that great 20th century classic book on war, a book about a school boy turned into a soldier overnight.