John Green Quotes

Some people think that English poetry begins with the Anglo-Saxons. I don't, because I can't accept that there is any continuity between the traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry and those established in English poetry by the time of, say, Shakespeare. And anyway, Anglo-Saxon is a different language, which has to be learned.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

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.

We've been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after Don Quixote was published.

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.

Literature is news that stays news.

A writer is justly called 'universal' when he is understood within the limits of his civilization, though that be bounded by a country or an age.

Shakespeare is practically our only link with the classic and the past. The future of education has much to do with whether we will be able to cling to him or not.

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

A classic is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion.

Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.

And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun.

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.

The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.

Because we are all of an oral tradition in our beginning histories, the voice of the poet in this particular society will be heard.

Look at anyone's bookcase at home, no matter how modest, and you're going to find a book that contains wisdom or ideas or a language that's at least a thousand years old. And the idea that humans have created a mechanism to time travel, to hurl ideas into the future, it sort of bookends. Books are a time machine.

By recycling pre-existing material, Shakespeare seemed to endorse a view common in his time, which has become even more entrenched in the 400 years since: that all the truly essential stories are already in the bag.

There's a wealth of literature out there which, hopefully, will be, you know, exploded in the future, and I personally find it very rewarding to be involved with classic storytelling, and sort of legendary characters.

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

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

I kind of dislike 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' but most of Hemingway in general, mainly because his stylistic shenanigans ruined so many young writers of my generation who tried to imitate him. I think, for his time, he moved fiction to a different level stylistically, or at least added to the dialogue, but in our time, he's annoying.

White people use their literature to maintain culture. That's why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.

So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.

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