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.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

I don't write literary fiction - I write books that are entertaining but are also I hope well-constructed and thoughtful and funny and have things to say about men and women and families and children and life in America today.

Life is a very orderly thing but in fiction there is a huge liberation and freedom. I can do what I like. There's nothing that says I can't write a page of full stops. There is no 'should' involved although you wouldn't know that from literary reviews and critics.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

At last in 1611 was made under the auspices of King James the famous King James version and this is the great literary monument of the English language.

I am an Episcopalian who takes the faith of my fathers seriously and I would I think be disheartened if my own young children were to turn away from the church when they grow up. I am also a critic of Christianity if by critic one means an observer who brings historical and literary judgment to bear on the texts and traditions of the church.

I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure.

Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

In England literary pretence is more universal than elsewhere from our method of education.

For this reason to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete.

The hoary joke in the literary world based on 'Dreams From My Father ' was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama he could have made it as a writer.

The New Testament evinces its universal design in its very style which alone distinguishes it from all the literary productions of earlier and later times.

When I started writing I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.

My dad's got a brilliant eye for scripts 'cos he's a literary agent. He and my agent read a load of scripts and filter them.

I can't change overnight into a serious literary author. You can't compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not.

You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.

One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. Of such wisdom the poetic passion the desire of beauty the love of art for its own sake has most.