Robert Hass Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• When Emily Dickinson's poems were published in the 1890s, they were a best-seller; the first book of her poems went through eleven editions of a print run of about 400. So the first print run out of Boston for a first book of poems was 400 for a country that had fifty million people in it. Now a first print run for a first book is maybe 2,000? So that's a five-time increase in the expectation of readership. Probably the audience is almost exactly the same size as it was in 1900, if you just took that one example.

  Robert Hass

  Country, Running, Book

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.

  Robert Hass

  Senior, Brother, Book

• My first book was published when I was thirty-two, so I think it was basically finished when I was thirty or thirty-one. And so then you think, "Well, what have you failed to do?" And my answer to myself was almost everything.

  Robert Hass

  Book, Thinking, Two

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. They long for the good old days when people read serious novels.

  Robert Hass

  Book, Long, People

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

• It's the same with this idea of a literate public, and also of a democracy in which people have access to and really read the best books. It turns out that even when you create this kind of environment, maybe only 10 percent of the people want to read those books.

  Robert Hass

  Book, Ideas, People

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

• I think it's true to say that in 1973 I could read every book of poems that was published in a year, and I did.

  Robert Hass

  Book, Thinking, Years

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• If you read three books a day you couldn't read all the poetry that's being published.

  Robert Hass

  Book, Three, Ifs

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• It seems like every ten years there's a book that says that poetry used to be popular, and now it's not, but we really have no way of knowing, in terms of relative size of audience and other things, exactly who readers were.

  Robert Hass

  Book, Knowing, Years

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• You only had widespread literacy and books that people could afford in the middle of the 19th century. Did more people read poetry at the turn of the 20th century when there were about fifty million people?

  Robert Hass

  Book, People, Fifty

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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