I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish.
Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time.
Whenever I'm making a film, it has to be timeless.
A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.
A classic is a book that survives the circumstances that made it possible yet alone keeps those circumstances alive.
I love films that aren't just speaking to certain moments in the culture but are something that people can revisit.
Animal Farm has seen off all the opposition. It's as valid today as it was fifty years ago.
All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.
To tell the truth, fairytales have never gone out of style. They have been told and retold for thousands of years, finding new shapes and structures with each new generation of tellers.
The newest books are those that never grow old.
Folk tales and myths, they've lasted for a reason. We tell them over and over because we keep finding truths in them, and we keep finding life in them.
A great piece of literature encompasses all that is and all that will be.
I think people are always saying things are 'over.' Fiction has been regularly 'over' since the 19th century.
A good book is never exhausted; we are never exhausted by a good book.
People try to pigeonhole comics by saying they're just for kids. So is The Odyssey. So is the Labors of Hercules, the story of Fa Mulan. The advantage of those stories over the contemporary ones is that they've had 2,000 years of editing. All the crap has been weeded out over time.
There have been more books alone written about Hamlet than have been written about the Bible.
As with all great works of literature, 'Of Mice and Men' moves with the inexorability of a huge river, and it pours itself, exhausts itself, in the sea of our unconscious. Having read it, we carry the book inside us forever.
The good books stick around for a reason. There is a reason that we come back to them and they are so rewarding.
What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.
October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen. It is the distant hills once more in sight, and the enduring constellations above them once again.
A lot of religious texts make for good reading. That's why they hold up.
I suppose it's true that most great television, literature, and other forms of high art (and basic cable) benefit from a little hindsight. 'M.A.S.H.' comes to mind. So does 'The Iliad.'
If you think of 'Liberty Valance' or 'The Searchers,' there are moments in there that you'll never, ever forget... And it does not matter what century you are from.
It is a relief to read some true book, wherein all are equally dead,--equally alive. I think the best parts of Shakespeare would only be enhanced by the most thrilling and affecting events. I have found it so. And so much the more, as they are not intended for consolation.
All of the movies that last, that you return to, the movies that struck you as a kid and continue to open up to you 10 years later and 10 years after that - those are the movies I want to make. Those things are eternal.
