Cleon.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.”
As quoted in "Bermudian" (November 1950) by James Thurber
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Carl Van Doren 14
American biographer 1885–1950Related quotes
Stephen Spender
(1909–1995) English poet and man of letters
Response to a would be biographer in 1980, as quoted in "When Stephen met Sylvia" in The Guardian (24 April 2004) http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1201328,00.html
Context: I am very honoured by your wanting to write a life of me. But the fact is I regard my life as rather a failure in the only thing in which I wanted it to succeed. I have not written the books I ought to have written and I have written a lot of books I should not have written. My life as lived by me has been interesting to me but to write truthfully about it would probably cause much pain to people close to me — and I always feel that the feelings of the living are more important than the monuments of the dead.
Novalis
book
Blüthenstaub
Fragment No. 104; on Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
Blüthenstaub (1798)
“Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.”
Alan Bennett
(1934) English actor, author
“Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
(1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter
“In a weak moment, I have written a book.”
Margaret Mitchell
(1900–1949) American author and journalist
“I have written this book to discharge a debt.”
Walter Rauschenbusch
(1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian
Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Introduction, p.xv
Context: I have written this book to discharge a debt. For eleven years I was pastor among the working people on the West Side of New York City.... I have never ceased to feel that I owe help to the plain people who were my friends. If this book in some far-off way helps to ease the pressure that bears them down and increases the forces that bear them up, I shall meet the Master of my life with better confidence.
Theodore Dalrymple
(1949) English doctor and writer
Trash, Violence, and Versace: But Is It Art? http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_1_urbanities-trash.html (Winter 1998).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms