In The Compact Between Novelist And Reader,

What Was Lost In The European Cataclysm Was Not Only The Jewish Past--the Whole Life Of A Civilization--but Also A Major Share Ofthe Jewish Future.... [ellipsis In Source] It Was Not Only The Intellect Of A People In Its Prime That Was Excised, But The Treasure Of A People In Its Potential.

What's Impossible Not To Notice, Though - It's All Around Us - Is The Diminution Of American Prose: How Pedestrian It Has Become. Pick Up Any Short Story And Listen To Its Voice, The Tedious Easy Vernacular That Mistakes Transcription For Realism. This Would Display An Understandable Pragmatism If It Were A Pandering To Common-denominator Readers; But It Is, In Fact, A Kind Of Hifalultin Literary Ideology, The Less-is-more Hemingway Legacy Put Through An Up-to-the-minute Industrial Blender.

I Wanted To Use What I Was, To Be What I Was Born To Be - Not To Have A 'career', But To Be That Straightforward Obvious Unmistakable Animal, A Writer.

What We Think We Are Surely Going To Do, We Don't Do; And What We Never Intended To Do, We May One Day Notice That We Have Done, And Done, And Done.

Dedication To One's Work In The World Is The Only Possible Sanctifica-tion. Religion In All Its Forms Is Dedication To Someone Else's Work, Not Yours.