A Quote by Pico Iyer

A book doesn't have to be a literary classic, of course, to change us forever.

Pico Iyer

Quote Topics

Book Change Classic Course Forever Literary Us

Quote Author

Pico Iyer
Indian - Novelist
Born: February 11, 1957

Like Richard Ellmann on James Joyce, Arnold Rampersad on Ralph Ellison is in a class of its own. His masterful and magisterial book is the most powerful and profound treatment of Ellison's undeniable artistic genius, deep personal flaws, and controversial political evolution. And he reveals an Ellison unbeknownst to all of us. From now on, all serious scholarship on Ellison must begin with Rampersad's instant and inimitable classic in literary biography.

Cornel West

The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.

Phillip Adams

Every few seconds a new book sees the light of day. Most of them will just be a part of the hum that makes us hard of hearing. Even the book is becoming an instrument of forgetting. A truly literary work comes into being as its creator's cry of protest against the forgetting that looms over him, over his predecessors and his contemporaries alike, and over his time, and the language he speaks. A literary work is something that defies death.

Ivan Klíma

I want my books to exist in the literary world, not only in the art world. I am interested in having a dialogue with other writers, and the readers of those writers. Someone who is reading a book of mine might not have visited my exhibitions related to it, but can still have a full, literary experience with that book. This would be a completely different experience from stepping into the show, not having read the book. One form is not illustrative of the other.

Jill Magid

At any moment the decision you make can change the course of your life forever.

Tony Robbins

I can't change overnight into a serious literary author. You can't compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not.

John Grisham

You don't have to be dead to write a classic, and you don't have to be literary to be smart.

Lisa Scottoline

No dictator can last forever. History shows that in the end, people around the dictator bring about change. Of course, a lot of high-ranking officials don't want change because they want to keep power. But there are other good people who want change. I believe they are waiting for the chance.

Lee Hyeon-seo

I've heard people ask, What's so sacred about a classic books that you can't change it for the modern child? Nothing is sacred about a classic. What makes a classic is the life that has accrued to it from generation after generation of children. Children give life to these books. Some books which you could hardly bear to read are, for children, classic.

Frances Clarke Sayers

The book I'm working on next, which will be my fifth, returns to literary history. I really do love literary history, and I have plenty more ideas on it.

Matthew Pearl

Sometimes, all it takes is one gesture, one word, to change the course of someone's life. Even if you know it won't last forever.

Jean-Claude Izzo

I think a good book is a good book forever. I don't think they get less good because times change.

Megan Whalen Turner

Of course, there are those critics - New York critics as a rule - who say, 'Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it's good but then she's a natural writer.' Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

Maya Angelou

Sometimes literary critics review the book they wanted you to write, not the book you wrote, and that's very irksome.

Jim Harrison

A dollar put into a book and a book mastered might change the whole course of a boy's life. It might easily be the beginning of the development of leadership that would carry the boy far in service to his fellow men.