I can't claim to be disenchanted "with the current state of fiction" because I read so little of it. My reading is mostly drawn to history.

We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection to anything at all is taken as a full-scale revolution. Should any soul speak up in favor of the obvious, it is taken as a symptom of the influence of the left, the right, the pink, the black, the dangerous. An idea for its own sake - especially an obvious idea - has no respectability.

In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.

Whoever mourns the dead mourns himself.

Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.

It is true that money attracts; but much money repels.

Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.