It doesn't seem to me that anyone has discovered much that's new since the Iliad or the Odyssey.

After the magical act accomplished by Joyce with Ulysses, perhaps we are getting away from it.

It doesn't seem to me that anyone has discovered much that's new since the Iliad or the Odyssey.

It is the creator of fiction's point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the story he is telling is as interesting as universal history.

All confessions are Odysseys.

Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey.

All societies are historical.

The Odyssey is the story of Americans up to the point where they are well-established, and even so it is detached from the historical side.

Ulysses finds himself unchanged, aside from his experience, at the end of his odyssey.

The Iliad is the private lives of people thrown into disorder by history.

Religions tend to disappear with man's good fortune.

Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.

When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing.

We have gotten away from this double aspect of either putting the character back into historical events or of making a historical event of his very life.

The Odyssey is the story of someone who, in the course of diverse experiences, acquires a personality or affirms and recovers his personality.

There have been only rare moments in history where individual histories were able to run their course without wars or revolutions.

It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein.

A very great Iliad... concerns the creation of a nation.

One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey.

To have one's own story told by a third party who doesn't know that the character in question is himself the hero of the story being told, that's a technical refinement.

We have no reliable guarantee that the afterlife will be any less exasperating than this one, have we?

But I don't like working on lyrics publicly in the studio - I prefer to take them away and work on them in my bedroom.

The most irresistible charm of youth is its bubbling enthusiasm. Youth sees no darkness ahead - no defile that has no outlet - it forgets that there is such a thing as failure in the world and believes that mankind has been waiting all these centuries for him to come and be the liberator of truth and energy and beauty.

There is so much to do on a film set. It is an extraordinarily invigorating and wonderful place to be, when things are running well.

Free speech is one of the founding principles of our republic.

My fascination has been the space between cloth and the body, and using a two-dimensional element to clothe a three-dimensional form.

When I married Paul, we lived in St John's Wood in London. We had nice next-door neighbours, but you don't know anyone else. Everyone lives in isolation.

A land without ruins is a land without memories -- a land without memories is a land without history.

I think people identify with Columbo because he is an average man.

I do no writing while I'm in Belgrade visiting my grandma.

I grew up in Perugia, Umbria, in a world outside of fashion, so I didn't learn about it until I was older and moved away. In Milan, the women are really into fashion, and all the big fashion brands are based there, but I don't think they feel pressure to look good all the time.

It's not about what the speaker wants. It's not about necessarily what I want. There's two other principles involved here. It's what the constituents in my district want, and they didn't want to raise the debt ceiling unless there were significant structural reforms and spending cuts to help us balance our budget.

When we have nothing to cling to as our own and cease thinking of ourselves as people who must defend privileges, we can open ourselves freely to others with the faithful expectation that our strength will manifest itself in our shared weakness.

My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.

I've learned how much of an impact that music has on people. I get messages all the time from people telling me what my music means to them and what it has done to them.

Sometimes you want to whisper in God's ear, 'God, we know you are in charge, but why don't you make it slightly more obvious?'

Saudi Arabia is, of course, the keystone of OPEC. Saudi Arabia has had the distinction of remaining stable through all the escalating tumult of recent decades, reliably pumping out its roughly 10 million barrels a day like Bossy the cow in America's oil import barn.

A huge change has taken place in my lifetime.

You can do whatever you want with my work.

I love writing for young adults because they are such a wonderful audience, they are good readers, and they care about the books they read.

I had many friends to help me to fall; but as to rising again, I was so much left to myself, that I wonder now I was not always on the ground. I praise God for His mercy; for it was He only Who stretched out His hand to me. May He be blessed for ever! Amen.

It's interesting - years ago, I had such bad stage fright during musical theater auditions that I just gave up. And now I'm on Broadway.

Every person is endowed with God-given abilities, and we must cultivate every ounce of talent we have in order to maintain our pinnacle position in the world.

I'd like my super power to be puns; I'd like to be great at puns: pun power. Then I could go on loads of panel shows and live off that forever.