Franz Wright Quotes

It doesn't seem to me that anyone has discovered much that's new since the Iliad or the Odyssey.

Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.

'The Odyssey' is the great tale, and I was really taken by 'The Iliad,' so I dig into those things, and when I was a kid I didn't. You've gotta have a certain level of understanding yourself before that stuff really starts to resonate.

I was fantastically well versed by the time I left school. I had a teacher who put 'A Clockwork Orange' my way, and 'Catcher in the Rye.'

I was about 11 or 12 when I began to pick up my mother's books.

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.

I love Shakespeare and the Greeks - learned a lot studying them at one time.

Every novel is a debtor to Homer.

Would Alexander, madman as he was, have been so much a madman, had it not been for Homer?

I had amazing intellectual privilege as a kid. My mom taught me to read when I was two or three. When I was five, I read and wrote well enough to do my nine-year older brother's homework in exchange for chocolate or cigarettes. By the time I was 10, I was reading Orwell, Tolstoy's 'War and Peace,' and the Koran. I was reading comic books, too.

The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story.

I wanted to know if the 'Iliad' in the original was as relevant and contemporary as it was in translation. I then started Latin. I had finally found something I enjoyed and was good at: dead languages!

Homer's whole language, the language in which he lived, the language that he breathed, because he never saw it, or certainly those who formed his tradition never saw it, in characters on the pages. It was all on the tongue and in the ear.

I loved every minute of my three years majoring in classics at Berkeley.

It has always seemed to me a pity that the young people of our generation should grow up with such scant knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, its wealth and variety, its freshness and its imperishable quality.

Reading is an exercise for learning how to write and vice versa. I have read myself into being a Christian, but I have also written myself into being a Christian.

All men begin their learning with Homer.

Mum had done everything you need to educate a kid. She made me a kid who likes books and she told me about 'Wind in the Willows' and read it and I thought this is weird, Rat, Mole, Toad and my first ever Bolshie thought - you know about 'The Wind in the Willows.'

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.

I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.

Books guided my life from high school, and the greatest, most interesting, most provocative, funniest, smartest people who ever lived in the last 200 or 300 years wrote those books. I would fall in love with Victor Hugo and read not just 'Les Miserables,' but 'Bug-Jargal' and 'The Toilers of the Sea' and so forth.

I don't remember much about the specifics of the economics courses that I majored in - I apparently internalized the key concepts - but I still remember vividly the thrill of reading 'Don Quixote,' Epictetus, 'The Aeneid,' 'King Lear' and 'Candide,' and how contemporary the stories and ideas in these old and ancient texts struck me.

As a kid, I spent every summer bent over a stack of books, obsessively writing detailed reports on each one.

I just finished my homework fast, I was bored to death. There wasn't 500 channels so there was a thing for a librarian to teach a kid like me about reading. I started reading early and I read all the time, because I love it.