Art & Creativity Quote by Henry Brooke

Brooke’s line flatters the reader’s social instincts while quietly mocking them. By likening a book to a neighbor, he yanks literature out of the salon of “taste” and drops it into the daily grind of proximity: what matters is not abstract merit but how it behaves in your life, how long you’re forced to live with it. The wit turns on time as the real currency of judgment. A good book “cannot last too long” because the pleasure is in sustained company; you want the visit to stretch, to keep finding new angles in the conversation. A bad one is an imposition, and the urgency to “get rid of it” implies more than boredom: a lousy book occupies space, attention, even mood. It’s clutter with sentences.

The subtext is a gentle piece of moral hygiene. Brooke is policing what we allow to linger around us, suggesting that reading is less a virtue than a form of household management. Keep the worthwhile close; eject the tedious quickly. There’s also a small jab at performative endurance. If you keep suffering through a bad book, you’re not being noble; you’re being socially trapped, like the neighbor who won’t stop talking on your doorstep.

Context matters: as an 18th-century novelist, Brooke is writing into a culture where novels were still negotiating their respectability and where reading was increasingly a leisure habit, not just scholarship. The analogy reassures anxious gatekeepers: books are companions, yes, but we’re allowed to be picky about our company.