Influential Works Quotes

Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.

With 'Brick' there was the Dashiell Hammett influence, and with 'Brothers Bloom' there was a really strong Fellini influence - both those movies wore that on their sleeve.

If you're a good composer, you steal good steals.

Many bad books have had great influence.

As far as I can see, the best writers in the last two hundred years have been Whitman, Rilke, Proust, Kafka. Their best works: 'Leaves of Grass - 1855;' 'Duino Elegies;' 'The Captive & The Fugitive;' 'The Castle.'

If you read only the best, you will have no need of reading the other books, because the latter are nothing but a rehash of the best and the oldest. To read Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, and their compeers in prose, is to read in condensed form what all others have diluted.

The ideas get under your skin. I am honored and deeply excited by the thought that the next generation of writers, or whomever, are influenced by these books.

I like the fact George R. R. Martin took Shakespeare's political plays as material, but he also took on all sorts of other sensational stories and mingled them in together.

In the critics' vocabulary, the work 'precursor' is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemics or rivalry.

'Death Of A Salesman,' 'Streetcar Named Desire,' these are the things that, when I was growing up, made me want to be an artist.

No novel is a clone of any preceding one, though with a background cast of characters and things that has grown to thousands, there are many familiar aspects.

Shakespeare is forever coming into our affairs -- putting in his oar, so to speak -- with some pat word or sentence.