Greg Kinnear Quotes

In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics.

Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.

I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.

Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust - not exactly authors one expects to whiz through or take lightly, but like all works of genius, they are meant to be read out loud and loved.

If you're looking for a book that's not been influenced by 21st century popular culture and that's guaranteed to be a good read because it's stood the test of time, you can't go wrong with the classics.

I love books that stand the test of time.

I'm guilty of it myself, sort of thinking, 'Classic novels: snoozeville.' But there is a huge amount of wonderful material.

Let's face it: the 19th century really was the great age of the novel - Melville, Hawthorne, Tolstoy. These are the people I really admire.

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

One of the greatest things about writing as a profession is that the words of Tolstoy, Chesterton and Dostoyevsky have lived for a hundred years and are just as powerful today. Their words have changed me just as much as the people I actually met.

Classic music will always come across better on the ice because skating has such a rich history, rooted in tradition.

Sometimes I want to have a mental book burning that would scour my mind clean of all the filthy visions literature has conjured there. But how to do without 'The Illiad?' How to do without 'Macbeth?'

My book is traditional. It runs counter to the post-modern spirit.

I kinda go for the Jane Eyre type of film. I am fascinated by classics.

I always read a lot as a kid and I'd spend long periods of time in my room reading... I wasn't reading anything great until I got older, but I used to read Agatha Christie mysteries and all of Ian Fleming's 'James Bond' novels.

Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers.

Ever since I was young, I've read Austen and the Brontes. My friends laugh, but those books are always so tragic and wonderful - those stories, they're just incredible.

The truly great books are always novels: 'Anna Karenina,' 'The Brothers Karamazov,' 'The Magic Mountain.' Just as with 'Shahnameh,' I browse these books from time to time to remember how a great book works on us or to teach my students at Columbia University.

There are perennial stories like 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Sherlock Holmes' and those sorts of things, which have been around since almost as long as film, and 'Frankenstein' is another one. They're perennial favorites, which get remade every 20 years, and that's OK.

Shakespeare language is fantastic, and to be honest, you don't need to do anything to Shakespeare.

My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers - Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few.

Increasingly, I find myself drawn to classic forms - to Euripides, Shakespeare and grand opera.

Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world

I love 'Jungle Book' and all the classics growing up, but what I learned about this is that these Disney films are basically classic fables that have been told for thousands of years.

I don't think you can ever remake a classic.