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.

It is useless either to hate or to love truth - but it should be noticed.

I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.

Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.

Time heals all things but one: Time.

To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.

Time at length becomes justice.