A Quote by Alan Dean Foster

Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world, which is what I always wanted to do. I'd really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it's the wrong century.

Alan Dean Foster

Quote Topics

Travel Always Been Century Francis Like Me Really Richard See Sir Time Wanted Which World Writing Wrong

Quote Author

Alan Dean Foster
American - Author
Born: November 18, 1946

I wanted to create a believable feeling for 18th Century reality in the Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer. I didn't want this typical film feel of strange people in strange costumes, not really knowing what to do or how to move. If you put an 18th Century costume on Alan Rickman, it looks like he's been wearing it forever because he inhabits the stuff. He is a character that can really travel in time as an actor and transform into this 18th Century person with seemingly no effort.

Tom Tykwer

The person I've always wanted to interview but never met was Richard Burton.

Charlie Rose

Nobody's ever called me Sir Richard. Occasionally in America, I hear people saying Sir Richard and think there's some Shakespearean play taking place. But nowhere else anyway.

Richard Branson

I wanted to travel the world - I don't how that idea got in my head, but I really wanted to see the world... towns, cities, countries, I wanted to see them all.

Jimmy Cliff

There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me.

Franz Kafka

The television anchorman Dan Rather turns up in rag-top native drag in Afghanistan, the surrogate of our culture with his camera crew, intrepid as Sir Richard Burton sneaking into Mecca.

Lance Morrow

I've honestly always been an overly analytical, highly observant person. I was playing music but thinking about it at same time, which was sort of exhausting. Aside from the pain of writing - you're not really in a gang like you are in band, it's a little bit lonelier - I think it was always something that I'd wanted to do. So the transition wasn't abrupt or painful.

Carrie Brownstein

Well, the traveling teachers do come through every few months," said the Baron. "Yes, sir, I know, sir, and they're useless, sir. They teach facts, not understanding. It's like teaching people about forests by showing them a saw. I want a proper school, sir, to teach reading and writing, and most of all thinking, sir, so people can find what they're good at, because someone doing what they really like is always an asset to any country, and too often people never find out until it's too late.

Terry Pratchett

I realised that I had always been writing things that other people wanted me to write and not what I really wanted to write, so I felt like I was losing my way.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I travel with a lot of clothes, which is a really bad idea because it's such a nightmare to travel. I always overpack because I like to bring things with me, and I accumulate stuff, so it piles up. I travel with everything I own.

Dakota Johnson

I used it in a shot where Richard Burton goes down the hall to get a gun in a closet. And I wanted to get some excitement, and the hallway was too narrow for the dollies that they had at that time. So it was quite useful.

Haskell Wexler

Richard is a very sexy man. He's got that sort of jungle essence that one can sense." (on Richard Burton)

Elizabeth Taylor

American travel writing is very healthy. I'm always flicking through the reviews and I see plenty of travel writing - and an impressive line up and continual demand.

John Gimlette

What I really learned from Tim Burton is that it's important to have your own person in a role because you can't play a character unless there are elements of human behaviour that you yourself understand. I was really struck by how Tim Burton would like to sit and chat about you... or question things which then you had never thought about. It is a good thing to always step back a bit with things like that. But I try my damned hardest to learn something from everything I do.