William Golding Quotes

I've had very close relationships with some twentieth-century writers.

I lived in Calcutta for five months in 1999. While I was there, I read many journals, diaries, collections of letters and histories.

I'm not too interested in books about India.

The juxtaposition of India and Australia is such a great one to explore.

I think, after Pakistan, the two countries where I have received most love and respect are India and Australia.

[On the writers she admires:] I prefer dead writers, because I don't see them at parties.

It's rare that you get to read, let alone teach, an arbitrary canon of your choosing in a tight time setting, and I tore through a fairly wide range of Indian writers, some contemporary - like Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie - and others older, like R.K. Narayan. And I think what happened at that stage was that I was forced to take a position in my own writing style that was more fixed, as opposed to reading a book at a time and defining myself in opposition to or in awe of it.

People to people contact is essential for Nations to come closer.

If it wasn't for the British musicians, a lot of us black musicians in America would still be catchin' the hell that we caught long before. So thanks to them, thanks to all you guys. You opened doors that I don't think would have been opened in my lifetime. When white America started paying attention to the blues - it started opening a lot of doors that had been closed to us.

The Australian Gerald Murnane, a genius on the level of Beckett, is known in Australia and Sweden but almost nowhere else. And I loved Reality Hunger, David Shields' recent novel take on the art of the novel.

I sometimes think the contemporary white American is more culturally deprived than the Indian.

I ask everyone - white Hollywood and black Hollywood - to get outside of your comfort zone and make friends. That's where they're going to learn from each other, and that's where they're going to make better movies and make Hollywood a better place.

I was profoundly embarrassed by it [the White Australia Policy] and did all I could to change it.

My friend, Dennis Mathis, was reading Eastern European and Japanese experimental writers, and I brought the Latin American writers to his attention, so we exchanged books and bounced off one another.

We're not going to play the blues anymore. Let the white folks play the blues. They got 'em, so they can keep 'em.

Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron 's struggle cease.

I am happy making the films I make and I would like the West to be impressed with what we do from India.

But re-reading Voss also demonstrates again that although White wasn't 'a nice man', and indeed was—perhaps rightly—scathingly dismissive of my and other Australian writers' work and origins unless they were his friends, he was a genius, and Voss one of the finest works of the modernist era and of the past century.

Yog is not only about Rog Mukti but also Bhog Mukti. Yoga can be our cultural ambassador. We can reach out to the world through this medium.

I am Plato's Republic. Mr. Simmons is Marcus. I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book, Gulliver's Travels! And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and-this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr. Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we all are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confucius and Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln, if you please. We are also Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

There's no doubt that many of the mainstream white institutions tend to be cosmetic and symbolic when it comes to including African-Americans, whereas we black folk tend to be much more sensitive about embracing others, and we have a long history of that.

When they learn of Shakespeare and Goethe, we must teach them of Pushkin and Dumas. . . . Whatever the white man has done, we have done, and often better.

Shigure Sohma: [got Tohru a maid costume for White Day] I can't wait to for her to call me master while wearing this. Hatsuharu Sohma: Just don't get arrested, okay?

I don't collect things per se, but I do pick up things as I go. Like, in my studio I have an old sewing machine from Germany that my dad gave me, and then something else that I got from a friend in India, and a piece of flooring from one of my shows.

I will make such a wonderful India that all Americans will stand in line to get a visa for India