Even my failures make money and become classics a year after I make them.
The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.
I say, don't read the classics - try to discover your own classics; every life has its own.
Science is vastly more stimulating to the imagination than the classics.
Some of my favorite songs--and I don't know if this is the right terminology--are white-boy classics.
Most of the time, I don't watch classics with anybody. I have to be by myself. That's my classroom.
We should imitate the great classics. We would miss, and that miss would be our originality.
I played Hamlet, I played Chekhov and Ibsen and all the classics.
I like reading. . . French, Russian classics - Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert. I also like Hemingway, Virginia Woolf.
You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?
I wanted to get the most broad foundation for a lifelong education that I could find, and that was studying Latin and the classics. Meaning Roman and Greek history and philosophy and ancient civilizations.
In New York, I was excited about the music in New York because the only music that I was more or less involved with in the South was either country and western or hillbilly music as we used to call it when I was a kid and, ah, gospel. There was no, there was no in between. And when I got to New York all the other musics that's in the world just came into my head whether it was the classics, jazz, I never knew what jazz was about all, had heard anything about jazz.
Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing.
Most of the literary classics are worth reading, if you've nothing better to do.
Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college.
I read a lot of poetry. All types of poetry, but mostly Catalan poetry, because I believe poetry is the essence of language. Reading the classics, be they medieval or contemporary, gives me a stylistic energy that I'm very interested in.
Andy Wiliams' smooth voice and casual style turned the songs he sang into timeless classics and made him one of America's top pop singers. . . . The entertainment industry has lost a giant piece of its living history today, but Williams' legacy will forever be enshrined in the annals of music and television.
I start each collection thinking how I can refresh my classics.
But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.
In order to be able thus to misjudge, and thus to grant left-handed veneration to our classics, people must have ceased to know them. This, generally speaking, is precisely what has happened. For, otherwise, one ought to know that there is only one way of honoring them, and that is to continue seeking with the same spirit and with the same courage, and not to weary of the search.
