C. S. Lewis Quotes

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

Hollywood looks to these young people now to say something to the world. I have nothing against that, I think a lot of people have things to say. But I think you need life experience.

We've had American TV shows in Britain for years and that hasn't affected our culture at all.

The best university is the university of life.

If you say one gets influenced watching a character, I think it's foolish. Cinema reflects society; society rarely reflects cinema.

People used to laugh that academics would study Disney movies. There's nothing more important for academics to study, because they shape the minds of our children possibly more than any single thing.

I think for a lot of us, you know, what 'Hamilton' gave us the opportunity to, what it gave me the opportunity to do, was to go, 'Here's what I've learned in 35 years.'

I've learned a lot in life, travelling, living abroad, just in the school of life.

Kendrick Lamar taught me that life experience is an important part of being a good illustrator. When you're illustrating a story, you have to go based off of your personal experiences.

The entertainment industry has an effect on social consciousness.

Experience converts us to ourselves when books fail us.

Movies don't necessarily change culture. I don't know if we know for sure if movies change culture but we know for sure that they reflect culture.

That which we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so.

TV shapes thought as surely as language shapes it.

It just sort of happened. I wrote like what I'd always read and what was in the movies... I'm sure popular music is supposed to be like this.

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They repeat, they re-arrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a singular change-that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, nonce, struck out.

In a short amount of time, I've lived so much, had so many experiences and met so many different types of people and even lived in so many countries. If I had been in school, I'd be learning about the world from books.

You asked if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure, there's been some scandal, but people are scandalized all the time; it's a way of life for them. It doesn't mean a thing. If you ask if I want my fiction to change anything in the culture, the answer is still no. What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book — if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don't. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them.

You realize that especially when you're writing a book like this, looking back on your life, that there's just such a depth of understanding you acquire over time with the help of the people who love you that that's when you can really get down to what you really think and believe.

If I had not lived the life I had lived and did not have the wife I have and the children I have, I would never know how to play that role [of Dr. Bedsloe], and I wouldn't have any of those qualities. It's a real example of how it is true that the camera catches everything. Even the stuff you're trying to hide.

The first half of my life I went to school, the second half of my life I got an education.

[It] is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. […] The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining. (87)

A man's real education begins after he has left school. True education is gained through the discipline of life.

I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read... I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.