What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.

Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb.

The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.

Language makes culture, and we make a rotten culture when we abuse words.

To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.

All politicians know that every 'temporary' political initiative promised as a short-term poultice stays on the books forever.

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.