When You're Sure Of What You're Looking

I Think That If The Novel's Task Is To Describe Where We Find Ourselves And How We Live Now, The Novelist Must Take A Good, Hard Look At The Most Central Facts Of Contemporary Life - Technology And Science.

The Use Of Music Is To Remind Us How Short A Time We Have A Body.

Time Passes, As The Novelist Says. The Single Most Useful Trick Of Fiction For Our Repair And Refreshment: The Defeat Of Time. A Century Of Family Saga And A Ride Up An Escalator Can Take The Same Number Of Pages. Fiction Sets Any Conversion Rate, Then Changes It In A Syllable. The Narrator’s Mother Carries Her Child Up The Stairs And The Reader Follows, For Days. But World War I Passes In A Paragraph. I Needed 125 Pages To Get From Labor Day To Christmas Vacation. In Six More Words, Here’s Spring.

The Job Of Taste Was To Thin The Insane Torrent Of Human Creativity Down To Manageable Levels. But The Job Of Appetite Was Never To Be Happy With Taste.

Evil Is The Refusal To See One's Self In Others.