Tadashi Shoji Quotes

'The Gambler' by Dostoevsky. It was the first time I realised that it was possible to have good and evil in one person. It led me to read a lot of Russian literature.

In my youth, I found that I was quite often inspired and pushed forward by what I read.

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.

Books are but stepping stones to show you where other minds have been.

Ah! Young people, travel if you can, and if you cannot - travel all the same!

There's books that are about places we will never go, and then there's books that inspire us to go.

I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.

I think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive.

I left Jamaica for a while, because as an artist I need to experience different things, see the world, have different energies. Living in one place is not good for me.

It's funny that I got to do 'On the Road' because the thing that had the biggest impact on me growing up was reading books. I was very inspired by the book and this spirit of Dean Moriarty and how envious we all are of somebody who can be that carefree.

Books stay with me and have shaped me and made huge impacts on my life.

My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel: not travel like a tourist, but travel as exploration. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection.

My first book was the book that changed my life.

But, for instance, when I was awfully young, I read all the Oz books. They were an enormous influence on me.

Moscow is a huge inspiration for me. I love what I find here, I love being here.

A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority.

Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.

When I bought a collection of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I returned home with a bright enthusiasm to begin the long march into the Russian soul. Though I've failed to read either man to completion, they both helped me to imagine that my fictional South Carolina was as vast a literary acreage as their Russia.

Six months later I was in Paris. I was 16, and it all started to happen.

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'm not sure there's a difference between books that affected the way I see the world and books that influenced me as a writer.

When I came to London as a young man, I was very excited by it and that's never gone away.

And then a great thing in my life was going to India.

I regret waiting until my mid-twenties to really start seeing the world. I think I should have taken more risks when I was younger and worried less about being ready to grow up.

It's cool to meet your idols. It's a good opportunity to travel. Those kinds of things are good.