The intercourse between the Mediterranean and the North or between the Atlantic and Central Europe was never purely economic or political it also meant the exchange of knowledge and ideas and the influence of social institutions and artistic and literary forms.

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

I am in the Master of Professional Writing program teaching Humor Writing Literary and Dramatic.

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.

Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history their literary history their movie literacy their culture their language their religion whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that nor do I want to.

Of all the species of literary composition perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed which is wanting in general history.

Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.

No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it's probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.