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 never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.

People may think of Southern humor in terms of missing teeth and outhouse accidents but the best of it is a rich vein running through the best of Southern literature.

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

It felt as if things were literally slipping through my fingers. Things were just streaming away from me. I lost my sense of humor. I'm still looking for that.

My books are shelved in different places depending on the bookstore. Sometimes they can be found in the Mystery section sometimes in the Humor department and occasionally even in the Literature aisle which is somewhat astounding.

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.

I think I was a good student because I jumped over a school. My main interest was basically history and literature. Sports were basically basketball and swimming at a pool. I was so happy.

When I arrived at Columbia I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry French history French literature.

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.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic a mere working mason if he possesses some knowledge of these he may venture to call himself an architect.

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.