Gene Simmons Quotes

William Shakespeare sounds to me like some kind of faggot.

Norman Mailer thinks William Burroughs is a genius, which I think is ludicrous beyond words. I don't think William Burroughs has an ounce of talent.

Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival; his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion.

Why are we reading a Shakespeare play or 'Huckleberry Finn?' Well, because these works are great, but they also tell us something about the times in which they were created. Unfortunately, previous eras and dead authors often used language or accepted as normal sentiments that we now find unacceptable.

The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.

Many of my works fall into the category of 'Zeitgeist novels'. Yet I hope that they aren't only reportage, but also attempts to convey the sense of the present to the future.

People think for Shakespeare you have to have a big English accent, but it's not true. He designed it so it can be performed in any accent in any time period.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Shakespeare would never have gone far in today's politically correct world.

I began in an era where four-letter words were not allowed.

What's really interesting about that is that a lot of these words that were incendiary in their time now seem almost harmless and laughable, because they have this archaic quality.

They can't just tell everybody else to ignore all the other meanings that it's accrued..

[Critiquing the Gettysburg Address:] We did not conceive it possible that even Mr. Lincoln would produce a paper so slipshod, so loose-joined, so puerile, not alone in literary construction, but in its ideas, its sentiments, its grasp.

Shakespeare didn't work at all for me.

From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

I think I started writing because no one had ever told me you can write about the things you know in a musical. They don't have to come from some far off place.

I don't think I'm like Shakespeare.

I don't think that you can rehash music that was born in the Fillmore East and came from a whole different set of social and emotional circumstances. The situation has changed. Let's get real about this.

I think honestly, believe it or not, that Dude, Where's My Car? in a way represents its time better than almost any film made around that.

There seems almost a general wish of descrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.

And I think right now I'm just enjoying finding something such as One Weekend a Month where I can really resonate with this woman's history and her situation.

Man is apt to be more moved by the art of his own period, not because it is more perfect, but because it is organically related to him.

I think Yelena Akhtiorskaya is a genius. What she manages to do, linguistically and emotionally, in the span of a single sentence, is astonishing.

But re-reading Voss also demonstrates again that although White wasn't 'a nice man', and indeed was—perhaps rightly—scathingly dismissive of my and other Australian writers' work and origins unless they were his friends, he was a genius, and Voss one of the finest works of the modernist era and of the past century.

And I think that's important, to know how the water's gone over the dam before you start to describe it. It helps to have been over the dam yourself.