Quotes About Literature

I did go to UCLA for art, but the other option was going to Sarah Lawrence and doing creative writing all the way. So that is part of the reason I love to read so much.

People still try to sell books that way - as 'books can take you to foreign lands.' We've given children this idea that reading and books are a nice option, if you want that kind of thing. I hope we can get over that idea.

When I think about a book like 'A Clockwork Orange,' which I really loved, the weird hybrid language is what I remember most.

Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.

I think I was 16 when I had the thought of maybe being a writer. And this is complicated, something I only now understand, because when I was young, having dyslexia and not knowing it made reading such an ordeal.

I honestly thought I probably did sell 100 million books. That doesn't seem out of the ordinary to me.

My parents are the reason I wanted to make Shakespeare available to ordinary people.

Books and theater were the way I understood the world and also the way I organized my sense of morality, of how to live a good life.

Fiction is organized gossip.

Faulkner was almost oriental. I never got into Faulkner.

When I'm working with German audiences, I will call on my Rilke and Goethe in the original.

I've made seventeen or eighteen films now, only two of which have been original screenplays, all the others have been based on short stories or novels, and I find the long short story ideal for adaptation.

From its beginning, fan fiction has been written mostly by women. Originally, this was because of a dearth of interesting female characters in conventional sci-fi.

I had originally been looking at writing, including fiction.

I write sets of books, but I've also written a lot of orphans.

Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.

I've always been interested in those Orwellian dystopian novels, like 'Fahrenheit 451,' 'Brave New World,' and obviously Orwell's '1984.'

When I was a kid, there were really only two possible futures in the foreground, which were Orwell's '1984' and Huxley's 'Brave New World'.

I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.

My father had inklings of my cultural aspirations. He would take me to the library, things like that. But he wasn't one of those dads who had read George Orwell and was a member of the Communist party. We had no books at home.

Oscar Wilde was sort of my first love as a young reader. And then I went on to love Jane Austen's wonderful - this sort of comedy coming from her. I mean, all of her books are comic.

I've always been fascinated by Oscar Wilde.

Growing up in San Antonio, I was the dork at the Friday night football games with my head buried in a book - Jack Kerouac or Oscar Wilde, years before I really understood them.

I love Oscar Wilde, still the wittiest writer of anyone, dead or living.