Victor Hugo Quotes

All men begin their learning with Homer.

In the ancient times, bards went around singing the epics, which were storehouses of philosophy.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

I am a writer. I am rooted in Tolstoy, I am rooted in Homer, I am rooted in Cervantes.

It was the last generation of writers [ the Cheers] that had grown up reading books instead of watching TV. So you weren't getting anything that was derivative of I Love Lucy or Happy Days. You were getting real characters [like those] they read in P.G. Wodehouse or Dickens or somewhere along the line, because they had all grown up with a love of literature.

At an early age I sucked up the milk of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Terence, Anacreon, Plato and Euripides, diluted with that of Moses and the prophets.

Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.

Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read.

That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.

One has a sort of spiritual obligation to go back to the source material of the literature, to make contact with one of the seminal plays of the modern theater.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

Music and literature have always and continue to be massive influences. Writers such as Seamus Heaney and Frank McGuinness. I have always admired the humanitarians that I knew growing up in Derry whose influence steered me in the direction of some of the work that I have chosen in the past.

One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey.

White people use their literature to maintain culture. That's why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.

The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.

I would then go on to say that Homer, as we now know, was working in what they call an oral tradition.

One of the rules of Greek lament poetry is that it mustn't mention the dead by name in case of invoking a ghost. Maybe the 'Iliad,' crowded with names, is more than a poem. Maybe it's a dangerous piece of the brightness of both this world and the next.

The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.

I can't measure up to Homer. His composition has survived for nearly three millennia and remains the world's most beautiful and mournful depiction of war. But the story of the Trojan War does not belong to Homer. The characters he employs were legendary long before he was born.

The literature from which I come is rather large.

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

Long before we created libraries, or even books, poetry was the way we humans remembered who we were, a primary means of documenting and contemplating our lives.

I find inspiration from a lot of different texts and really old stories and folk tales - things I feel like no one else is reading.

There were poets before Homer.