William Scott Quotations

The British system had requirements, including Latin. I'm not positive you ever had to know Greek, but there are certainly kinds of curricula where you had to know Greek too. I think in Britain there was the most mindless, repetitive sort of learning.

The one thing you've got to say about Columbia is that it has courses that are famous. It has alumni who come back and say it was the best thing they ever did.

I no longer worry whether a painting is about something or not. I am only concerned with the expectation, from a flat surface, of an illusion.

On occasion I have drawn as a release from painting. The economy in using paper, pencil, charcoal and crayon can help towards a greater gamble and higher rewards. I also find that drawing can generate ideas more rapidly than painting.

There are certain authors that do not turn students on; it is the truth. Homer happens to be one of them.

You just don't want to push people into doing things that they really don't want to do. I don't think it's going to produce much.

When I was an undergraduate at Princeton, freshman year, first term, I ended up in the course on Plato's Republic. That book just captivated me - not because of the answers, and the answers can be somewhat unsatisfying, but because of the questions, the way you went at it, the methods, the kinds of questions you could ask, the different answers you could get. That's why I'm still fascinated by that book.

I think it is important for us as teachers to offer a huge spread of courses from Plato, the deadest white male around, to very modern philosophy.

I think it's amazing to see this action with a car that everybody's so familiar with, in the backwoods and on dirt roads and stuff.

My thinking is they need more security here, like metal detectors. A knife shouldn't have been brought into school.

I thought it could make a really cool movie set in the South about this family. People are really familiar with these characters.

We rely on each other to get through.

We all teach students a massive body of material to get some sort of mastery of it, pass a judgement, and defend it.

Especially our students serve as staff volunteers in their home town.

The theory on my part is to read; reading is the answer. Read anything that you can get your hands on. I would try to make sure that the author has something to say. Take a wide selection of authors: old, new, prose, poets, novels, epics, and all that stuff. ..Think about it and find something to talk about.

A lot of the stuff that I've done is just really broad comedy and the characters are not that bright. Obviously with the 'American Pie' films and 'Road Trip,' my guys were kind of dicks. These guys in 'Dukes' are good guys.

For a Classicist, one must learn to ask the questions in the way that a pagan society did. I think it's very important and tough for many of us who grew up in a Judeo-Christian society.

I had actually, at that point, been working with a guy back in L.A. just training with a car; not the General Lee, but other cars.

I feel I can't teach you anything, what I can do is organize some material that may seem wildly complex when you first take a look at it. I've been working at it for such a long time I can at least organize it. So you can go home and teach yourself how to get control of it... I could throw an act, I can tell jokes and try to be stimulating, I can organize the books. If you don't want to do it, I can't do anything about it.