Quotes About Classics

The largest two books I've ever read more than once are 'Bleak House' by Charles Dickens and 'The Stand' by Stephen King, about 1,200 pages each.

Charles Dickens left us fifteen novels, and in an ideal world, everyone would read all of them.

But why, he said with animation, do the English not read their own great literature? Victor laughed triumphantly, and said, Because at school they are made to hate it.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Novels are all so full of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since Tom Jones, except The Monk; I read that t'other day; but as for all the others, they are the stupidest things in creation.

My background is somewhat unusual, as I trained to be a ballet dancer. I worked in the theatre for eight or nine years as a contemporary dancer. But as an actor one does read Shakespeare and does try to learn the classics.

What interests me is the idea that classics is actually quite democratic. It isn't only the toff, upper-class subject it's often thought to be. Every generation enjoys rediscovering it.

I still love to do the old songs. I know some people don't.

My first job ever, I was 14 years old - I was working at this mom-and-pop video store, and they basically paid me by allowing me to take home as many movies as I wanted, and that's how I started watching all the classics and really getting into it.

I love Carpenter, I love Craven - these are all the classics - the Romeros of the world, but I think the biggest influence on me as a storyteller and as a filmmaker is actually Steven Spielberg. I love that even though Steven isn't known for being a horror director, he started out his career making scary movies.

You know, I find it very strange when movies that I made that were just excoriated - I mean that I was just vilified for - are now looked at as classics.

The Furies?" Zara said. "The Erinyes? The terrible ones?" At Nikki's look of surprise, Zara rolled her eyes. "I'm an actress, woman, remember? I've read the classics. Christ, I'm starring in motherfucking Medea, in case you hadn't noticed." "Oedipus was the mother-fucking one," the disheveled old lady said, sounding pleased with herself. "Not Medea.

50 Self-Help Classics and 50 Spiritual Classics, which explore books on the more transformational and spiritual sides of psychology.

Oh, I am very old fashioned about my literature taste. I like Henry James. I like George Elliot. I like Dostoyevsky. I like the old people. I really do. I like people who write big, fat, juicy novels you can get completely lost in!

Since the Indian film industry is one of the oldest, and I have grown up admiring all the movies, especially the classics starring Guru Dutt, I would love to work here.

My film collection is all oldies.

The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.

Read the great books, gentlemen," Mr. Monte said one day. "Just the great ones. Ignore the others. There's not enough time.

The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.

but which of us has read every line of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost? Only men of epic stomach can digest these epic tales.

The Classics, it is the Classics! & not Goths nor Monks, that Desolate Europe with Wars.

Dr Jaffery said that very few people in Delhi now wanted to study classical Persian, the language which, like French in Imperial Russia, had for centuries been the first tongue of every educated Delhi-wallah. 'No one has any interest in the classics today,' he said. 'If they read at all, they read trash from America. They have no idea what they are missing. The jackal thinks he has feasted on the buffalo when in fact he has just eaten the eyes, entrails and testicles rejected by the lion.

My mom and dad played this music all the time when I was growing up, so to me songs by Jerry Lee and Fats Domino are the classics, they're the best songs ever.

imagine anybody having lived forty-five or fifty years without knowing Hamlet! One might as well spend one's life in a coal mine.