Carlisle Floyd Quotes

I'm really into the 'classic' thing - the craft of writing something that will last, that won't die by next year.

I just want to make a classic. Classic is the standard. I'm just trying to make music that will last a lifetime.

If I were brave enough to say so, I'd like to think that I had written some poems that people are not going to forget.

Written pages are something that can be returned to, reclaimed, and when they are marvelous, never lose their power.

I want to make music that stands the test of time.

Every writer secretly hopes that what he or she has written will endure.

My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever.

I want to create songs that will last across time.

I definitely don't aspire to writing that's 'timeless,' whatever that means.

My aspiration was to write a book that you could still read in 10 years. That's hard. Then you start doubting every sentence you write.

I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time

I want to do something splendid… Something heroic or wonderful that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead… I think I shall write books.

Lives there the man with soul so dead as to disown the wish to merit the people's applause, and having uttered words worthy to be kept in cedar oil to latest times, to leave behind him rhymes that dread neither herrings nor frankincense.

We see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power, or of the hands. For have not the verses of Homer continued twenty-five hundred years or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities have been decayed and demolished?

I'm not making any absurd comparisons between myself and Bach, but I aspire to that, that my music will have the legs to survive whatever context it finds itself in.

They have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse, a period in prose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell that survives a deluge.

Only well-written works will descend to posterity. Fulness of knowledge, interesting facts, even useful inventions, are no pledge of immortality, for they may be employed by more skilful hands; they are outside the man; the style is the man himself.

When you write, you want fame, fortune and personal satisfaction. You want to write what you want to write and feel it's good, and you want this to go on for hundreds of years. You're not likely ever to get all these things, and you're not likely to give up writing and commit suicide if you don't, but that is -- and should be -- your goal. Anything else is kind of piddling.

I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.

I hope people find my movies funny and will watch them years from now. And, in terms of writing, I hope that something remains that will not seem old-fashioned, that will still have a ­vibrancy to it 50 years from now.

Art is not disposable.

Horace, in a particularly boastful mood, once said his verse would last as long as the vestal virgins kept going up the Capitoline Hill to worship at the temple of Jupiter. But Horace's poetry has lasted longer than Jupiter's religion, and Jupiter himself has only survived because he disappeared into literature.

There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature. They are like gigantic trees that we sometimes see on the banks of a stream; which, by their vast and deep roots, penetrating through the mere surface, and laying hold on the very foundations of the earth, preserve the soil around them from being swept away by the ever-flowing current, and hold up many a neighboring plant, and perhaps worthless weed, to perpetuity.

I have completed a monument more lasting than brass.

Truthfully, I guess I would like to be remembered as a great writer and a kind person. I wouldn't mind if an expensive bag were named after me, like Jane Birkin.