Erik Larson Quotes

Come English Settlement, I had it in my head that I didn't want to tour.

The best way to travel abroad is to live with the locals.

I only got 'War and Peace' on the third attempt.

One of my great all-time loves in cinema, and I've seen it three times, is Bondarchuk's 'War and Peace.' Not a lot of people may have seen that film. It was made during the Soviet era.

I love watching old movies, and some of the holiday-themed ones are really great. I also have a bizarre thing that I'll do: I'll turn on a foreign-language TV station, usually Spanish, and watch a whole show, riveted, even though I have no idea what anyone is saying. I don't know why I find that so addictive, but I do!

At Oxford University, I studied languages so I could read the great novels as they were originally written. I took what in the United States would be a double major in Russian and French, but I have to admit that the pressure of getting through so many books spoiled reading for me.

The old fun thing is when somebody typed up the first chapter of War and Peace. And then made a precis of the rest of it and sent it out and only one publisher recognized it.

I'd read books in Russian, and they would take me forever. I wanted to write a book that would last and would not be superficial. Siberian-travel writing is its own genre.

When I bought a collection of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I returned home with a bright enthusiasm to begin the long march into the Russian soul. Though I've failed to read either man to completion, they both helped me to imagine that my fictional South Carolina was as vast a literary acreage as their Russia.

When I was at U.C.L.A., I decided I was going to go to Japan and learn Japanese.

It's always fun to immerse yourself in a different time period.

I wanted to do something far from my intellectual and physical home, so I went to live in Beijing for eight months and took Mandarin Chinese.

A person can do a lot of reading and research as I have done. I went to Spain and spent a whole summer there with my family, immersing myself in the culture. But all that isn't really necessary to experience the music.

But I have a list of books that I want to read before I die, and whenever I get time to read something that isn't a script, I'll read something from that.

I like to write in coffee shops in countries in which languages I do not speak are spoken. That way, you're surrounded by the buzz of humanity, but you aren't distracted by people's conversations.

I travel like a maniac. I travel more than anyone I know. I love learning the languages.

I have to admit that I only read 'War and Peace' when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.

That helped me to keep in touch with myself and to keep in touch with this really quite extraordinary language and literature into which I had pushed a little way.

I have never had so much fun as in Montreal. I taught the kids French, I baby-sat, I went to school, I was a receptionist at a hairdresser's, I danced and drank all night. I found that the more you do, the more you have time to do... it's weird, non?

I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

It's a very immersive and intense form of travel to walk around with an interpreter and stop random people on the street and ask them about their lives.

In fact I enjoyed every minute of my life at King's, especially the discovery of French and German literature.

It is quite common to meet people that live a few kilometers away from Mexico and that have never been there. We need to revive on many levels an illustrious desire to get to know the world, to learn another language, to understand and create empathy with people that live a few kilometers away from us. It's never late to do this.

Whether it's in America, Quebec, or France, if I can tell a story that takes me out of my comfort zone, then I'm surfing.

I don't want to mess with my face. So I'm becoming fluent in French so I can go to France and make French films when I'm 60.