Quality Literature Quotes

if a book is not good enough for a grownup, it is not good enough for a child.

Good books are irrefutable, and bad books refute themselves.

Anything well written with good language and clarity and honesty is worth doing. It comes out of the same tradition as Shakespeare.

The novel is a highly corrupt medium, after all - in the end the vast majority of them simply aren't that great, and are destined to be forgotten.

This is what I believe is most important: getting good books into the hands of kids - books that will make them want to say, 'Wow, that was great. Give me another one to read.'

I immersed myself in The Periodic Table gladly and gratefully. There is nothing superfluous here, everything this book contains is essential. It is wonderful pure, and beautifully translated...I was deeply impressed.

This is mainly because I spend a lot of time writing and so don't have much time to read; I hate to waste that time reading what may turn out to be junk food for the mind, when there's so much real writing to be read.

Be sure then to read no mean books. Shun the spawn of the press on the gossip of the hour. Do not read what you shall learn, without asking, in the street and the train.

It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading.

I read all kinds of novels, as long as they're good.

Any literature, when it arrives at being good literature, transcends genre.

If a writer knows what he or she is doing, I'll go along for the ride. If he or she doesn't... well, I'm in my fifties now, and there are a lot of books out there. I don't have time to waste with the poorly written ones.

There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.

There's always that discussion about fiction about how do you market it - these are books for boys, these are books for girls, these are books for adults. Actually, they're just stories, and if they're good stories, then they surpass those boundaries.

I'm just going to write the best books I can.

It seems to me that the novel as a medium has a very low signal-to-noise ratio. By which I mean: there are a lot of novels published, but the vast majority of them don't represent major contributions to the medium.

Good writing is good writing, and I'm so happy when I read it.

I am a rereader. Quality is variety if you wait long enough. Barthes, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Celine, Duras, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Melville: There is so much to revisit. 'Ingrid Caven,' by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, is always in rotation. I used to read 'Morvern Callar,' by Alan Warner, every year - I adored that book.

Being influential is not the mark of a great book.

One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.

These weren't cheap modern books; these were books bound in leather, and not just leather, but leather from clever cows who had given their lives for literature after a happy existence in the very best pastures.

It's often better to read first-rate science fiction than second-rate science - it's far more stimulating, and perhaps no more likely to be wrong.

Readers want a good book; it's a writer's job to give it to them.

Readers should aspire to what is excellent. They should refuse to read a substitute Bible. They should want a Bible that calls them to their higher selves - or to something higher than their current level of attainment.

People have proven over and over that they will read if they are given something they like. The problem with reading is not reading, its that almost everything out there sucks. For so long, publishing has been run by a cartel of snobby pseudo-intellectual failed writers, and the resulting output has reflected not what the market wants, but what they think people are supposed to read.