If ideas are what feed serious literature and arresting language, who today is writing a novel of ideas (which can often mean comedy)? I think of Joshua Cohen. Who else?
Advances in technology neither impede nor augment literature.
The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
Old saws have no teeth.
I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.
I would distinguish between a visitor and a pilgrim: both will come to a place and go away again, but a visitor arrives, a pilgrim is restored. A visitor passes through a place; the place passes through the pilgrim.