Literary Reference Quotes

I don't play golf. Mark Twain is golf to me.

I wrote the first draft of 'Madame Bovary' without studying the previous translations, although I gathered them and took the occasional peek.

I was also known as Frodo because I was an early adopter of 'The Lord of the Rings.'

Whoa!" he says with a smile. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes deepen. "Chicken salad a la George Orwell!

I gotta say - if I clicked on a movie interview, and the first part was all about Walt Whitman, I'd love that article.

[One of my kids ]is not named after Aldous Huxley. I haven't even read Brave New World!

Originally, when I wrote the song 'The Sensual World' I had used text from the end of 'Ulysses.' When I asked for permission to use the text, I was refused, which was disappointing.

I am in fact, a hobbit in all but size

If Francoise Sagan hadn't written a book called A Chateau in Sweden, I would certainly write a short story called A Chateau in Puerto Rico. And I may yet.

I have a lot in common with Lewis Carroll's Alice (my favorite female literary heroine, besides Becky Sharp). I've been sent on a journey to places even bleach can't reach.

In those days Mr. Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road.

You are all a lost generation. [with credit to Gertrude Stein]

I feel like if you're a girl in the South, you know 'Gone with the Wind' better than anything. Scarlett O'Hara is such a quintessential Southern woman.

Hillary has her work cut out for her. Her Democratic challengers are a 'Who's Who' of 'who's that?' Jim Webb, Lincoln Chafee, Silas Phelps, Peter Wilks... now those last two were characters from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. You didn't even notice, did you?

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

Being somebody who's like a theater geek that I am, I can just go right back to Aeschylus and Euripides and Sophocles: they were writing about gods and goddesses versus humans, and how gods could distort, pervert, or help people get what they want.

A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

If you take my stuff apart, you'll find my choruses of repetitions are picked up almost verbatim from Kurt Vonnegut, and my distanced fracture quality is all from Amy Hempel, who's probably my favourite writer.

I've been joking that 'On the Road' is the prequel to 'The Road.' I don't know if that's a very good joke.

Visually speaking, nothing calls Shakespeare to mind like Hamlet holding Yorick's skull.

I'm named after Jane Austen's Emma, and I've always been able to relate to her. She's strong, confident but quite tactless.

I had this almost Dickensian look. I was quite fragile.

I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert.

This Romeo character is something I decided to create, like my alter ego. So the name Romeo was invented from the original Romeo and Juliet. I wanted to show people I'm like a modern Romeo.

The perfect opening is the word imagine, because imagine allows you to communicate in the eyes and the vision of the listener rather than yours. And the best illustration of that is "1984." Room 101 in "1984" - everyone's read it, and we all have our own imagination of what that looks like.