The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

Why go for a costly sickly mass-produced purebred when shelters are full of one-of-a-kind mixed breeds who are literally dying for a home?

I live in literally the same home when I was swiping my first bank card and wondering if I'd have to put back the Charmin. We still don't have a dishwasher. My mom has done all these gardens so now my house looks like the garden shack in the middle of Versailles.

With fiction you can talk about plot character and narrative whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.

When I go on the plane to fly home I'm literally capable of forgetting what I do for a job. That also comes about because I choose to take massive breaks between projects and because I choose to do this ridiculous thing of keeping home home.

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.

How do you make any sense of history art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?

I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.

Watch the History Channel if you want it literal and historically perfect.

The study of history and philosophy accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.