Baz Luhrmann Quotes

As a kid, I wanted to be part of the Lost Generation who came to France.

I read a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I love 'Tender is the Night,' and its atmosphere of doomed romance. He was one of the greatest prose stylists, with a wonderfully clear but lyrical quality.

I fantasised about F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' - I loved it, and then I read everything J. D. Salinger had to offer. Then I was turned on to Kerouac, and his spontaneous prose, his stream of consciousness way of writing. I admired him so much, and I romanticised so much about the '40s and '50s.

When I was young, I was a passionate reader of Sartre. I've read the American novelists, in particular the lost generation - Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos - especially Faulkner. Of the authors I read when I was young, he is one of the few who still means a lot to me.

For me, Fitzgerald was one of the great American writers of the last century; a wordsmith, a storyteller, a perfectionist.

I really like 'This Side of Paradise' by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I think it's a cool description of a character.

Images sometimes capture particular periods in history. The unreachable green light, beckoning from across the bay in 'The Great Gatsby,' has become a symbol of the yearning of America in the 1920s.

'The Great Gatsby,' by F. Scott Fitzgerald, remains the most perfect novel that has ever come out of the United States. Everything in the book moves as it should, in the manner of a piece by Bach or Mozart.

Of course, I'm of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.

Most writers have been influenced by Faulkner.

I originally wanted to be F. Scott Fitzgerald, but failed.

I'm a long time [Scott] Fitzgerald fan, as probably everyone in America is. And I've always been fascinated by that theme of, what is the price of the American dream and what parts of your soul do you walk away with? The conflict of art versus commerce was also very interesting to me.

I worship F. Scott Fitzgerald and I love his writing.

I developed a mania for Fitzgerald - by the time I'd graduated from high school I'd read everything he'd written. I started with 'The Great Gatsby' and moved on to 'Tender Is the Night,' which just swept me away. Then I read 'This Side of Paradise,' his novel about Princeton - I literally slept with that book under my pillow for two years.

I've read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'Look Homeward, Angel.'

The only time I would like to see was the 20s and 30s in America because I love the music and the style and the optimism, I wanted to see New York being built. I wanted to see all that, you know.

One gets the impression that this is how Ernest Hemingway would have written had he gone to Vassar.

The Roaring Twenties were the period of that Great American Prosperity which was built on shaky foundations.

I live in the Dark Ages, the 17th century. Actually, I would have loved to be in Paris in the early 20th century when the Ballets Russes were there and Chanel was designing.

James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.

Fitzgerald coined the phrase the 'Jazz Age,' and now we're living in the Hip-Hop Age.

I don't know a writer who doesn't feel some sense of glamour and magic and a complex, wistful sadness emanating from the expats of the twenties in France. Some of the sadness, of course, is that we weren't there.

Mother's interest in contemporary American artists emerged during the 1920s.

It's pathetic, but I don't really remember my first time reading 'The Great Gatsby.' I must have read it in high school. I'm pretty sure I remember it being assigned, and I generally did the reading. But I don't remember having a reaction to the book, even though I loved literature, and other works made a lasting impression on me at that age.

I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is different and interesting. Like reading Virginia Woolf for the first time or Lawrence Durrell for the first time.