Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. ... How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away.

...we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which relations between who someone is and what he believes and how he "expresses himself" have been thrown into big time flux.

Some persons can give themselves away to an ambitious pursuit and have that be all the giving-themselves-away-to-something they need to do. Though sometimes this changes as the players get older and the pursuit more stress-fraught. American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.

It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.

There are very few innocent sentences in writing.