The basic idea that the purpose of life is to be happy or is to experience the most favorable ratio of pleasure to suffering or productivity to work or gratification to sacrifice or any of that stuff, which, you know, a couple generations ago, to say that kind of stuff would have made you, you know, a freak - a freak and an Epicurean - and now seems to be so much - simply an unquestioned assumption of the culture that we don't really even talk about it anymore.

I am not what you see and hear.

If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.

I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.

Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.

It's in the democratic citizen's nature to be like a leaf that doesn't believe in the tree it's part of.

Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.