No book is really worth reading at the age of 10 which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of 50 – except, of course, books of information. The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have be...
He may really have been enjoying an embryonic composition of his own stimulated by mere hints in the book.
I am not sure that the best way to make a boy love the English poets might not be forbid him to read them and then make sure that he had plenty of opportunities to disobey you.
Matthew Arnold made the horrible prophecy that literature would increasingly replace religion.
To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series - the plot, as we call it - is only really a new whereby to catch something else.
A man may be ‘dated’ in the sense that the forms, the set-up, the paraphernalia, whereby he expresses the matter of permanent interest, are those of a particular age. In that sense the greatest writers are often the most dated. No one is more unm...
Matthew Arnold made the horrible prophecy that literature would increasingly replace religion. It has, and it's taken on all the features of bitter persecution, great intolerance, and traffic in relics. All literature becomes a sacred text. A sacred ...
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be ve...
The literary man re-reads, other men simply read.
