Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such naive readers testifies to a failure of imagination - the capacity to see into unfamiliar lives, motives, feelings - and this failure must, at least in part, be the failure of the teaching of literature in the schools.

In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.

literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.

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 art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.

Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.

Why do men carry guns and build prison camps, when the nurturing earth is made for freedom?