Quotes About Classics

The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.

The title song of David Bowie's 'Young Americans' is one of his handful of classics, a bizarre mixture of social comment, run-on lyric style, English pop and American soul.

Mike Tyson has to be one of my greatest all time fighters. Muhammad Ali. I like going back looking at the classics like Roberto Duran. I like the old time fighters, when you had a champion in the old days you really had a true champion. Muhammad Ali would take on anybody. You had the greats fighting everybody.

I try to make classics. I don't try to make things that aren't good. It's always a pleasure to see that people care about the kind of music I'm making.

I read a lot of poetry. All types of poetry, but mostly Catalan poetry, because I believe poetry is the essence of language. Reading the classics, be they medieval or contemporary, gives me a stylistic energy that I'm very interested in.

I didn't care for most of the books I was being asked to read in school. I started reading like crazy right after high school when I got a job in a mental hospital. I was working my way through college, and I did a lot of night shifts, and there was nothing to do. So I read like crazy, serious stuff, all the classics.

Books that have become classics - books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal - always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.

Liz [Gillies] doesn't really listen to anything new, besides Adele, Ariana Grande, and stuff like that. She loves '70s music and old '60s songs. She loves songwriters from the '70s that I hate, like Jim Croce and James Taylor, and she loves Stevie Nicks and old jazz classics.

The great thing about university is that they incline you to get up and do it, from the Classics to modern plays, to the humor that Monty Pythons made popular.

When I was 20 I was immensely proud of the rows of grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics in my bookcase.

Being a theater actor, I've done a lot of plays where I've seen someone else play the same role in another production. Especially with the classics: Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams.

Your library teacher would say, "What happens to a generation that doesn't read the Classics?" Me, I'm not your library teacher. But I have some of the same questions and concerns, you know?

I'm ready to do some classics. Maybe I wasn't in the beginning. I weighed 179 pounds when I got to New York, and I had that thick Southern accent. I still talk Southern, but I can do without it.

One of the challenges in writing the script Call Me by Your Name was that I had to find something concrete for the professor to do. In the book he is some kind of classics scholar. But I thought it would be interesting to make him into something of an art historian and archaeologist whose background was the classical world. It's always difficult when someone is supposed to be an intellectual. What do they do? You can't just film them sitting around and thinking all day. And that's what the business of the statues is all about.

It was also great shooting in London at Pinewood Studios because of all its history. So many of the 007 movies were filmed there, as well as classics by everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Jack Nicholson to Martin Scorcese. It's like working on hallowed ground. So, I felt a responsibility to make sure I did as good a job as I possibly could.

You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?