Great Books Quotes

The tendency of modern scientific teaching is to neglect the great books, to lay far too much stress upon relatively unimportant modern work, and to present masses of detail of doubtful truth and questionable weight in such a way as to obscure principles.

Reading a great book causes jolts and frights.

great books are the ones we need

I think instead writers and publishers and readers need to go to the places where people are, and make the argument that there is great value to the quiet, contemplative process of reading a novel, that reading great books carefully offers pleasures and consolations that no iPad app ever can.

Michel Houellebecq is the most interesting, provocative and important European novelist of my generation. Period. No one else comes close. He has written two or maybe three great books, and his latest, The Map and the Territory, is one of 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.

I am a writer. I am rooted in Tolstoy, I am rooted in Homer, I am rooted in Cervantes.

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.

It's crazy enough to be the person crawling through the bushes in Northern Ireland with a telescopic lens taking pictures - there are crazy people out there. But the idea that people want to go to sites and find out those spoilers... it's like if there was a website called Last Pages of Great Books, would you read that?

I wish I'd gone to a small liberal-arts college where I'd have read the great books instead of a large university where I majored in early-childhood education.

There are loads of novels that I really love, like Haruki Murakami's books, and when I read them, I do think about how they would work as an anime. But I do believe that those are great books because they work best as novels, or great manga work best in that form.

We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things.

Obama is a very fine writer with an excellent command of language. His memoir 'Dreams From My Father' is a fine book, but it will not rank as one of the great autobiographies.

I think that, for me, the great books like that, autobiographies, are great when the artists who write them throw caution to the wind and really put it out there as they saw it.

The truly great books are the few books that are over everybody's head all of the time.

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine - but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.

There's only one test of a great children's book, or a great children's film, and that is this: If it can be read or viewed with pleasure by adults, then it has the chance to be a great children's film, or a great children's book.

I generally travel with my laptop, a couple of great books, and my iPod.

Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards.

Life is too short to live with any but the greatest books.

I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen.

Belief in great results is the driving force, the power behind all great books, plays, scientific discoveries.

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