Virginia Woolf Quotes

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

I've tried not to treat Shakespeare as a marble giant.

Lincoln is a genius of language and a brilliant writer who deserves to be seen as part of the canon of great writers in American literature.

It's almost uncanny to receive a prize named in honor of Bernard Malamud. I must have been in my early teens when 'The Magic Barrel' was published and I first read it.

You learn from mistakes, but Shakespeare is one big non mistake isn't he? He just got everything right really.

This was Shakespeare's form; who walked in every path of human life, felt every passion; and to all mankind doth now, will ever, that experience yield which his own genius only could acquire.

People are starting to refer to 'The Giver' as a classic, but I don't know how that is defined. But if it means that 10, 20, 50 years from now kids will still be reading it, that is kind of awe-inspiring.

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.

Ibsen was Norwegian by birth, but universal in spirit.

If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.

There is only one school of literature - that of talent.

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

I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book.

Toni Morrison was a big influence on my work since I was a teenager, what she did with English. I joke that I think she speaks 20 Englishes simultaneously, that she knows how to do that.

One of the great pleasures of reading Tom Wolfe - of still reading Tom Wolfe - is the sense of awe he consistently inspires.

Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child!

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.

For a writer, personal freedom is not so important. It is not individual freedom that guarantees the greatness of literature; otherwise, writers in democratic countries would be superior to all others. Some of the greatest writers wrote under dictatorship - Shakespeare, Cervantes.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

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

I can't think of anything worse than calling Shakespeare 'highbrow,' because on the one hand, it's brilliant writing. But his plays were popular. People went to see them.

When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.

The society of dead authors has this advantage over that of the living: they never flatter us to our faces, nor slander us behind our backs, nor intrude upon our privacy, nor quit their shelves until we take them down.