With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration or rather obliterates all consideration.

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we're children but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they're scars of beauty or scars of ugliness it's pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.

The phenomenon of home schooling is a wonderful example of the American can-do attitude. Growing numbers of parents have become disenchanted with government-run public schools. Many parents have simply taken matters into their own hands literally.

Films for TV have to be much closer to the book mainly because the objective with a TV movie that translates literature is to get the audience after seeing this version to pick up the book and read it themselves. My attitude is that TV can never really be any form of art because it serves audience expectations.

Literature has drawn a funny perimeter that other art forms haven't.

More than art more than literature music is universally accessible.

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.