5 Quotes Tagged: good-books

"I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down."

[Letter to J. Beauchamp Jones, August 8, 1839]

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

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.

Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good' book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error. A book that is good for me would very likely be punk for you.