Italo Calvino Quotes

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.

If you're looking for a book that's not been influenced by 21st century popular culture and that's guaranteed to be a good read because it's stood the test of time, you can't go wrong with the classics.

I love books that stand the test of time.

I'm guilty of it myself, sort of thinking, 'Classic novels: snoozeville.' But there is a huge amount of wonderful material.

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics.

Charles Dickens left us fifteen novels, and in an ideal world, everyone would read all of them.

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

The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.

Read the writers whose work is still around and has survived the winds of fashion and the attacks of the ignorant and the bigoted - read everything you can get your hands on.

The truly great books are always novels: 'Anna Karenina,' 'The Brothers Karamazov,' 'The Magic Mountain.' Just as with 'Shahnameh,' I browse these books from time to time to remember how a great book works on us or to teach my students at Columbia University.

I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.

I enjoyed reading all the classic authors like Isaac Asimov and Bradbury.

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.

Let's face it: the 19th century really was the great age of the novel - Melville, Hawthorne, Tolstoy. These are the people I really admire.

One of those things where immediately when you started reading it, you knew it was something special and then the more you read, the more it surprised you, and the more you realized it was devoid of stereotype .

It amazes me when I talk to people in their early 20s and they've never read the classics, things we read as children. When you don't have knowledge and understanding, then fear rises in you.

Good books are for consideration after, too.

A few times a year I'll remember that I love old literature, too. Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" is one of my 10 favorite books. I have to go out of my way to remember to pick up a book like that, but when I do I'm blown away by how very relevant it still is.

The ideas of the classics, so far as living, are our commonplaces. It is the modern books that give us the latest and most profound conceptions. It seems to me rather a lazy makeshift to mumble over the familiar.

I'm ready to do some classics. Maybe I wasn't in the beginning. I weighed 179 pounds when I got to New York, and I had that thick Southern accent. I still talk Southern, but I can do without it.

Often, I go and see films where I can see the beats coming. So, if I read something where I don't see the beats coming and it takes me somewhere unexpected, that's a great thing to build upon.

A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.

The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights.

If you read only the best, you will have no need of reading the other books, because the latter are nothing but a rehash of the best and the oldest. To read Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, and their compeers in prose, is to read in condensed form what all others have diluted.