A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
'Classic.' A book which people praise and don't read.
What makes a classic is difficult to define. It's entirely subjective, of course. And the term is employed far too promiscuously.
What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.
You don't have to be dead to write a classic, and you don't have to be literary to be smart.
You can write a great book and be ignored. Literary history is full of classics that were under-appreciated in their own time.
When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.
The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.
Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.
A book doesn't have to be a literary classic, of course, to change us forever.