James Russell Lowell Quotes

The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet unfavourable for its growth.

Literatures, like trees and plants, are born of a land and in it flourish and die. But literatures, also like plants, may be carried abroad to take root in a foreign soil.

Writers such as Richard Powers and the late David Foster Wallace have shown the path to a newer generation of writers for whom all national boundaries are quaint curiosities.

Whether they know it or not, most American playgoers owe an incalculably great debt to translators. Were it not for their work, comparatively few of us would be able to enjoy the plays of Chekhov, Ibsen or Moliere.

Shakespeare has been adapted by Akira Kurosawa. 'Dangerous Liaisons' has been adapted into a Chinese movie. 'Blood Simple', the Coen brothers movie, was adapted by Zhang Yimou.

I think all literature should be read as comparative literature. And I think we should write out of what we know, but in the expectation that we can be changed at any moment by something we have yet to discover.

Although every novel is derived directly from another novel, there is really only one novel, the Quixote.

The Gothic tradition was begun by Ann Radcliffe, a rare example of a woman creating an artistic style.

The literary wiseacres prognosticate in many languages, as they have throughout so many centuries, setting the stage for new hautmonde in letters and making up the public's mind.

The principles of the Vedanta not only should be preached everywhere in India, but also outside. Our thought must enter into the make-up of the minds of every nation, not through writings, but through persons.

I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.

The director makes the movie. The director has to have the story in their head, has to know the style of the piece, has to answer questions from actors, design, set, lighting, every department throughout the pre-production, production, and post-production, because they've got it in their mind. They've got to know exactly what they want and what the style and story of the movie is. It's them. They make it.

In the critic's vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." -- Essay: "Kafka and his Precursors

A traveler's chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad-as well as good example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.

Writer's make national literature, while translators make universal literature.

As a teenager, I read a lot of H.P. Lovecraft, so I wrote like H.P. Lovecraft. And in my 20s, I read a lot of Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler, so I wrote like those guys. But, little by little, you develop your own style.

I don't think my film style has changed. I'm doing the same kind of jokes I did when I was younger.

... the novel, as a living force, if not as a work of art, owes an incalculable debt to what we call, mistakenly, the new psychology, to Freud, in his earlier interpretations, and more truly, I think, to Jung.

American audiences are affected by what the English people think.

I seem initially to have followed Fauvism, and then to have followed in Cézanne's footsteps. Whatever - I do not mind... as long as first of all I remained Vlaminck.

Mr. [Aldous] Huxley has been the alarming young man for a long time, a sort of perpetual clever nephew who can be relied on to flutter the lunch party. Whatever will he say next? How does he think of those things? He has been deplored once or twice, but feeling is in his favor: he is steadily read. He is at once the truly clever person and the stupid person's idea of the clever person; he is expected to be relentless, to administer intellectual shocks.

In my early teens, I read every bound volume of the magazine Punch. Every writer of any distinction in the English language, and I mean including America and England, at some time wrote for Punch. Jerome K. Jerome, who wrote Three Men In A Boat, I loved. I was very impressed when I read a piece by Mark Twain in Punch, and realized that despite the fact that they were on different continents, Jerome K. Jerome and Mark Twain had the same kind of laconic, laid-back, "The human race is damn stupid, but quite interesting" attitude. They were almost talking with the same voice.

You make all the fashion statements just by dressing up your mind.

I found English to be a sort of Thomas Hardy aversion therapy.

Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters.