Probably induced by the asthma I started reading and writing early on my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.

I guess the two Manifesto Communicating Vessels Mad Love and some of his poetry made a significant mark on me but as far as bringing a literary element into the music I see it as a much broader assimilation.

I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play it has a poignancy to it.

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre and installed instead as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it but anybody can do it.

Science fiction outside of poetry is the only literary field which has no limits no parameters whatsoever.

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen a lot of them will.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies including preliminary examinations in botany zoology physics and chemistry was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work.

It became plain very soon after our marriage that ours was to be a literary partnership.

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.

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.