Pastoral Resources

The first epics were intended for recitation; the literary epic is meant to be read.

The literary culture, if you examine it, the high literary culture is that which preserves the government and you know it's really the talk for those who have.

For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.

A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull.

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

We had literary references, so we knew what we were talking about. We could quote things, talk about books we'd read; you can say something, you don't have to explain it.

These were all middle-class kids from literary backgrounds, joining this sort of train going by, this pop train, jumping on. Whereas the rest of the rock scene, you'll find that there's mostly working-class people.

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

A literary journal is intended to connect writer with reader; the role of the editor is to mediate.

I have been told by a member of the board of one of Canada's most prominent literary magazines that a submission of mine once caused a great deal of controversy.

It took me fifty years to deal with the Holocaust at all. And I did it in a literary way.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

The greater the conceptual significance of a literary product, the more it should be assumed that it is based on an idea that determines the whole, and that the deeper consciousness of the time to which it belongs is reflected in it.

It must inquire not merely about the circumstances of the time in general, but in particular about the writer's position with regard to these things, the interests and motives, the leading ideas of his literary activity.

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

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

I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.

The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective.

It is the growth of advertising in this country which, more than any single element, has brought the American magazine to its present enviable position in points of literary, illustrative and mechanical excellence.

Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide.