All great popular literature today one day will be seen as great literature and will no longer be seen as popular literature.
Perhaps he was a fool, but he thought that if a work were truly great you would only have to read it once and you would be stolen from yourself, desperately moved, changed forever.
I take a certain pride in having maintained a reputation for fast copy throughout my newspaper career. Fast-breaking stories left my typewriter in a hurry. Not great literature, perhaps, but fast, and usually accurate.
When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.
There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.
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 want to listen to Beethoven and Mozart. I want to read the best minds. I want to live with uplifting art. I don't want to live a grubby life.
Literature bores me, especially great literature
A great novel is worth one thousand films.
I firmly believe there are books whose greatness actually enable you to live.
'Parable of the Sower' is capital-I Important. Put it on the literary fiction shelf. Put it on the Holy Crap fiction shelf. Put it on every shelf. This is one of the all-time great American novels.
The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it.
Steve Yarbrough's Safe from the Neighbors will take your breath away. Ambitious, funny, sad, smart, and beautifully crafted, it's everything a novel should be.
I think that the mark of a great book is that it will meet you wherever you're at and you'll feel and experience something new and different each time you read it.
The joy of great fiction is that it transports the reader to another world, where new characters live in otherwise unimaginable ways. It is one of the most powerful ways of generating empathy that I know.
Life is too short to live with any but the greatest books.
If a book is really good, it deserves to be read again, and if it's great, it should be read at least three times.
A great novelist must open the reader's heart, allow the reader to remember the vastness and glory -- and shame and shabbiness -- of what it is to be human.
Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.
Great books conserve time.
All great novels are great fairy tales.
Being influential is not the mark of a great book.
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.
The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.
