If You Want To Know The Real

One Of The Many Things I Do Not Understand About Americans Is This: What Is It Like To Be A Citizen Of A Superpower, To Maintain Democratically The Means Of Planetary Extinction. I Wonder How This Contributes To The Dreamlife Of America, A Dreamlife That Is So Deep And Troubled.

It's Becoming Clearer And Clearer To Me That The World Is There To Be Celebrated By Writers, And In Fact This Is What All The Good Ones Do, And That The Great Fashion For Gloom And Grimness Was In Fact A False Path That Certain Writers Took, I Think In Response To The Horrors Of The First Half Of The Twentieth Century.

I Would Say That The Writers I Like And Trust Have At The Base Of Their Prose Something Called The English Sentence. An Awful Lot Of Modern Writing Seems To Me To Be A Depressed Use Of Language. Once, I Called It "vow-of-poverty Prose." No, Give Me The King In His Countinghouse. Give Me Updike.

My Father Always Had Doubts About The Booker Prize, Although They Evaporated On The Announcement That He Had Won It.

Being Inoffensive, And Being Offended, Are Now The Twin Addictions Of The Culture.