Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

Literature usually begets literature.

When I met Miller, for me it wasn't a question of wanting to meet him because it was Arthur Miller; it was a kind of astonishment that I could meet someone who was so deeply embedded in the psyche of my artistic development.

I'm glad Wu-Tang was able to inspire other producers and artists, but I would never want to be erased or removed.

I really hesitate to say that any of my shows influenced other writers.

All these actors who died before I was born, all the theaters and the artistic movements - all that stuff fills you up and makes you feel like you're the inheritor of all this information and of all its passion.

Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.

Music is very influential to my writing, as are theater and film.

No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.

So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.

Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors.

The reverberation of the freedom of making 'Schizopolis' absolutely resulted in 'Out of Sight' and everything that followed.

To understand a field, you look at its arts. Arts can be cautionary as well as inspiring.

You boil down your influences to a soup, and it all informs you.

If you look at any creative person's work, you can see bits and pieces of their influences. That's what an artist does.

'Tragedy' and 'Loud City Song' are both inspired by stories from the past.

Artwork, films, TV - it's always informed my work, no matter what I'm working on.

There is certainly no one 'type' of writer who deliberately draws on Shakespeare. In fact, there's a strong argument that everyone writing in the English language is influenced by Shakespeare because, to a considerable degree, he shaped that language.

I love making music, but if you make something that inspires somebody else to make something, without getting too airy-fairy, you've contributed to the zeitgeist in some way, and that's just an amazing feeling.

My books and other works are my legacy, and it's a great comfort to know that mine is a legacy of pleasure for other people.

It just sort of happened. I wrote like what I'd always read and what was in the movies... I'm sure popular music is supposed to be like this.

Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

To be an Irish poet after that 19th century in which there was such a struggle toward the light, I think still will always be in the hearts of the writers of my generation and the generations before and hopefully the generations after.

Shakespeare has done far more for the world than the Bible.

In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.

The ideas get under your skin. I am honored and deeply excited by the thought that the next generation of writers, or whomever, are influenced by these books.