Classic Works Quotes

I don't read a lot of books that were published after 1755. One thing about having friends in New York who belong to the literary world, however, is that I have a steady stream of books coming to the house.

Shakespeare's work is like a good song: you never really forget the main lines.

The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.

The themes Poe used were universal and timeless. As long as the English language exists at all, we will be able to appreciate what he did. It will not age! It will not become dated!

Never read any book that is not a year old.

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

If people want to be better writers, they can't just read the blogs! You've got to look at something that's outside this rushing world of evanescent words.

He will find one English book and one only, where, as in the "Iliad" itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible.

Classics stay alive because a great actor or a great director wants to do them.

Shakespeare is repeated around the world in different languages, just because it's good storytelling.

Every old poem is sacred.

What makes a classic is difficult to define. It's entirely subjective, of course. And the term is employed far too promiscuously.

My experience of great storytelling, working with classics, is just finding a way to present it simply but let the story do its own work, or be an invite to the audience's imagination.

Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time.

It is a sure evidence of a good book if it pleases us more and more as we grow older.

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.

It's hard to be reverent today when directors make films that are not as good. There will be time later, though, when their lesser films are forgotten and just focus on the greatness.

The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.

I own a copy of the original 'Talking Heads' by Alan Bennett, which I purchased many years ago shortly after they were first broadcast. It's been lovingly well-thumbed over the years. They are magnificent. A masterpiece.

Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards.

The only test of work of literature is that it shall please other ages than its own.

There are things that are more important than the news and what’s happening today. There are these archetypes which are part of the human imagination since humans were presumably imaginative. And I think that’s what [people] find touching, these eternal ideas. It’s one of the things that makes fantasy something that tends to stand the test of time because we’re reading, 50 years later, The Lord of the Rings.

But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct. No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately.

I'm guilty of it myself, sort of thinking, 'Classic novels: snoozeville.' But there is a huge amount of wonderful material.

The great classics that, as a professional you don't get to do, you do as a student, when you don't know any better.