Timeless Works Quotes

Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust - not exactly authors one expects to whiz through or take lightly, but like all works of genius, they are meant to be read out loud and loved.

I'm lucky enough to work with, I think, the greatest writer there's ever been, Shakespeare. Whose collected works would always be under my pillow if I was only ever allowed one book to keep, and who never bores me.

Classics stay alive because a great actor or a great director wants to do them.

Shakespeare language is fantastic, and to be honest, you don't need to do anything to Shakespeare.

Shakespeare is a good raft whereon to float securely down the stream of time; fasten yourself to that and your immortality is safe.

There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato:-never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few persons, as if God brought them written in his hand.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I think it's really important to remake things. If you never remake the classics, no one would know Shakespeare.

If you read only the best, you will have no need of reading the other books, because the latter are nothing but a rehash of the best and the oldest. To read Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, and their compeers in prose, is to read in condensed form what all others have diluted.

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

Read. Read. Read. Read. Read great books. Read poetry, history, biography. Read the novels that have stood the test of time. And read closely.

I have a confession to make. The love affair of my life has been with the Greek language. I have now reached the age when it has occurred to me that I may have read some books for the last time. I suddenly thought that there are books I cannot bear not to read again before I die. One that stands out a mile is Homer's Iliad.

Shakespeare is a permanent presence in the English letters.

Sappho survives, because we sing her songs; And Eschylus, because we read his plays!

If you talking 'bout classics, do my name get brought up?

Shakespeare is renewed each time you see it or read it. I've seen 'Midsummer Night's Dream' so many times, and each time it's a little different, or a different line leaps out at me. It's like re-reading a good book over and over, always noticing something you hadn't seen the time before - and that's rare.

You don't have to be dead to write a classic, and you don't have to be literary to be smart.

I like the classics!

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.'

In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature the oldest.

Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever.

You learn from mistakes, but Shakespeare is one big non mistake isn't he? He just got everything right really.

Although as a rule the absurd culminates, and it seems impossible for the voice of the individual ever to penetrate through the chorus of foolers and fooled, still there is left to the genuine works of all times a quite peculiar, silent, slow, and powerful influence; and as if by a miracle, we see them rise at last out of the turmoil like a balloon that floats up out of the thick atmosphere of this globe into purer regions. Having once arrived there, it remains at rest, and no one can any longer draw it down again.

The test of real literature is that it will bear repetition. We read over the same pages again and again, and always with fresh delight.

Shakespeare is a seminal story-teller. I don't think he imagined he was writing classics or that he was writing great poetry. I don't think he dreamt his work would be staged 400 years after he died.

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