The Importance of Reading Classics

Classics. They seem to be eternal. We all have read them. We all want to read more. Anthem Press will be launching its own series of Classics in 2012. Watch this space!

In the meantime, here are some takes on Classics by well-known writers…

• “Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.” – Alan Bennett
• “A classic is a book that doesn’t have to be written again.” – Carl Van Doren
• “A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.” – Edmond and Jules De Goncourt
• “A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.” – Ezra Pound
• “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” – Italo Calvino
• “The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.” – Milan Kundera
• “The classics are important not because they are old but because they are always being renewed.” – Michael Dirda
• “When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before.” – Clifton Fadiman
• “A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” – Mark Twain