A Whole Generation Of Writers Dined Out

There Is Something About Seeing Real People On A Stage That Makes A Bad Play More Intimately, More Personally Offensive Than Any Other Art Form.

Sex Almost Always Disappoints Me In Novels. Everything Can Be Said Or Done Now, And That's What I Often Find: Everything, A Feeling Of Generality Or Dispersal. But In My Experience, True Sex Is So Particular, So Peculiar To The Person Who Yearns For It. Only He Or She, And No One Else, Would Desire So Very Much That Very Person Under Those Circumstances. In Fiction, I Miss That Sense Of Terrific Specificity.

Ruefulness Is One Of The Classical Tones Of American Fiction. It Fosters A Native, Deglamorized Form Of Anxiety.

The Moment A Book Is Lent I Begin To Miss It.

The Epic Implications Of Being Human End In More Than This: We Start Our Lives As If They Were Momentous Stories, With A Beginning, A Middle And An Appropriate End, Only To Find That They Are Mostly Middles.