Jackson Browne Quotes

My grandfather had a proper bookcase of egghead books, and he gave them to me in alphabetical order. So we moved from Aeschylus to the Brontas, and I can still remember the great relief of going from the dipus cycle to Jane Eyre.

Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers.

One of the greatest things about writing as a profession is that the words of Tolstoy, Chesterton and Dostoyevsky have lived for a hundred years and are just as powerful today. Their words have changed me just as much as the people I actually met.

English culture is highly literary-based.

In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics.

All of the great writers whom I admire have died. I guess the most recent one would be Marquez.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

When someone asks me to list the 10 best novels ever written, I always refuse to answer.

I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.

When I was a kid, I went through the whole process of reading great literature and trying to be very widely read.

I was fantastically well versed by the time I left school. I had a teacher who put 'A Clockwork Orange' my way, and 'Catcher in the Rye.'

I've tried not to treat Shakespeare as a marble giant.

The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.

My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to name a few.

The first writers are first and the rest, in the long run, nowhere but in anthologies.

I can imagine the writers of China, England and France, crippled and unsure of themselves when they feel that the ghosts of Confucius, Mencius, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Victor Hugo are looking over their shoulders.

There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.

The literature from which I come is rather large.

I'm not trying to emulate William Faulkner. I never said I was.

I grew up reading Proust all my life, and he's very dear to me.

I used to just sit down and read the dictionary, and I read the Bible and Shakespeare from cover to cover.

I quite liked Dostoyevsky when I was younger.

I grew up on Jane Austen novels and was a massive literature fanatic when I was a kid - I read everything I could get my hands on.

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.