Alexis Denisof Quotes

Enduring fame is promised only to those writers who can offer to successive generations a substance constantly renewed; for every generation arrives upon the scene with its own particular hunger.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Literature - novels, plays, and poems - can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.

Each generation confronts new problems, encounters new facts, and tells our history somewhat differently.

People who grew up on my books are now able to get the point across to others that they're worth reading.

Shakespeare is global - of course he can be shared.

A novel which survives, which withstands and outlives time, does do something more than merely survive. It does not stand still. It accumulates round itself the understanding of all these persons who bring to it something of their own. It acquires associations, it becomes a form of experience in itself, so that two people who meet can often make friends, find an approach to each other, because of this one great common experience they have had.

Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.

Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way.

Every author has the whole past to contend with; all the centuries are upon him. He is compared with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton.

The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation.

The best models of English writing are Shakespeare and the Old Testament.

Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today -- that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past.

But the tale or narrative set in the past may have its particular time-free value; and the candid reader will not misunderstand me, will not suppose that I intend any preposterous comparison, when I observe that Homer was farther removed in time from Troy than I am from the Napoleonic wars; yet he spoke to the Greeks for 2,000 years and more.

There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature.

No single crisis shapes a generation; but a succession of events, each one bringing its shaping blows to bear.

Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is still in print. They're debating right now over Mark Twain. He's still available. Winslow Homer can still be seen. Our arts are - they're there. We got to go get them and understand that this is an important legacy for our country.

The Don Quixote of one generation may live to hear himself called the savior of society by the next.

Sometimes to think about why some institutions are stable, it's interesting to go one generation back and look at the author of that stability.

[The poet] must write as the interpreter of nature and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations, as a being superior to time and place.

A writer ... whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation.

I became the voice of a generation in a very surprising way, because many Iranians recognize themselves in it. But that is not what I wanted.

You cannot write to resonate twenty or thirty or forty years from now. You only can write for that very day, but whatever happens is all gravy.