Walter Savage Landor Quotes

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

Critic's delight: scolding the Mighty Dead.

No art that is not in the end understood by the People can live or ever did live a single generation.

A good autobiography is like a document: a mirror of the age on which people can 'depend.' In a novel, by contrast, it's not the facts that matter, but precisely what you add to the facts.

Comedy ages quicker than tragedy, to the extent that we can't know if the 10 commandments may originally have been 10 hilarious one-liners.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

It must be understood that every architecture is bound to its time and manifests itself only in vital tasks and through the materials of its age. It has never been otherwise.

When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.

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.

A writer is justly called 'universal' when he is understood within the limits of his civilization, though that be bounded by a country or an age.

Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.

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

Too-lateness, I realized, has nothing to do with age. It’s a relation of self to the moment. Or not, depending on the person and the moment. Perhaps there even comes a time when it’s no longer too late for anything. Perhaps, even, most times are too early for most things, and most of life has to go by before it’s time for almost anything and too late for almost nothing. Nothing to lose, the present moment to gain, the integration with long-delayed Now.

In the same way that Shakespeare was writing very much for his time, he was also unearthing observations that would last for generations beyond him.

In every domain of art, a work that corresponds to the need of its day carries a message of social and cultural value. It is the artist who crystallizes his age ... who fixes his time in history.

Would Shakespeare and Raleigh have done their best, would that galaxy have shone so bright in the heavens had there been no Elizabeth on the throne?

The authors that in any nation last from age to age are very few, because there are very few that have any other claim to notice than that they catch hold on present curiosity, and gratify some accidental desire, or produce some temporary conveniency.

Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state.

A good book is fruitful of other books; it perpetuates its fame from age to age, and makes eras in the lives of its readers.

Fifty years," I hackneyed, "is a long time." "Not when you're looking back at them," she said. "You wonder how they vanished so quickly.

Personally I would like to see that the nuclear age, in terms of power, does come, because there's no long-term future for developing countries without nuclear power.

I've been around a long time, and it seemed for the longest time like I was the young guy. Now, all of a sudden, I've got fans with beards telling me, "I used to watch you when I was a kid." So, I don't know what happened to all those years, but the little bit I do remember? It was definitely a fun ride.

I just want to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, so that when I'm long gone my great-great-grandchildren can walk up to it and say, "That's my ancestor." That will be my legacy.

Architecture is the frame of human existence. We must dedicate this existence more to beauty. For if poetic principle has deserted us, how long are we going to last?

You can only understand the present age when it is past.