Richard Strauss Quotes

It has always seemed to me a pity that the young people of our generation should grow up with such scant knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, its wealth and variety, its freshness and its imperishable quality.

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.

My mother's father taught English literature. When I was about ten or eleven, I could recite Macaulay's 'Lays of Ancient Rome.' While other kids were playing pedestrian war games, I'd be Horatius keeping the bridge.

All men begin their learning with Homer.

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. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.

I glory in the distinguishing grace of God and will not, by the grace of God, step one inch from my principles or think of adhering to the present fashionable sort of religion.

The models of ancient literature which are put into the hands of the young student, can hardly fail to imbue his mind with the principles of liberty, to inspire the liveliest patriotism, and to excite to noble and generous action, and are therefore particularly adapted to American youth.

Periodically, I return to the classics for inspiration and refreshment.

All my desire was the conversion of the heathen... I declare, now I am dying, I would not have spent my life otherwise for the whole world.

Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and - as George Orwell said - “old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist” and if we get our way - Shakespeare still read even in school.

Damn the age. I'll write for antiquity.

Every novel is a debtor to Homer.

He that endureth to the end, shall be saved.

Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.

Let's have some good, old-fashioned literature, with a virgin and a moral.

I start movies with people that I believe in and people with visions, you know, that I believe in. And so if it doesn't kind of come together in the right way, at least I was doing it because I believed in the person and the movie.

A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.

Mama wanted me to be a preacher. I told her coachin' and preachin' were a lot alike.

As for the writers who have influenced me they are many. Hemingway, Chandler, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, William Goldman, Flannery O'Conner, Carson McCullers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and so many others. As a kid Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard.

The Land of Promise is for those who simply remain to the end.

I did lots of Shakespeare and classics, and I just kind of became that person. I was a bit of a snob.

The study of science teaches young men to think, while study of the classics teaches them to express thought.

Granny was an old-fashioned witch. She didn’t do good for people, she did right by them.

One believes in what one wants to believe in.

I hate brandy...it stinks of modern literature.