What Is Literature? Quotes from Twain, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Other Famous Authors
© Susan Jensen
Here are some interesting quotes by great writers about what makes a book a classic and what characteristics good books share.
Famous Author Quotes
"A classic—something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read." - Mark Twain
"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 ...." - Ernest Hemingway
"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again .... This is the artist's way of scribbling 'Kilroy was here' on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass." - William Faulkner
"The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him." - James Baldwin
"I can't bear art that you can walk around and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd." - D.H. Lawrence
"Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered." - W.H. Auden
"The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet ourselves." - E.M. Forster
"Great books are weighed and measured by their style and manner and not by the trimmings and shadings of their grammar."- Mark Twain
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