Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.

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

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

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

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.

But the young educated adults of the 90s -- who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr. Updike wrote about so beautifully -- got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation. Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.

I mean the people who seriously, seriously play devote their lives to it sort of the way monks do. I mean you don't date, you go to bed at a certain time, you eat certain ways, you practice 10-12 hours a day. And I mean, the difference between practicing three hours a day and practicing 12 hours a day is everything. And I certainly never - I never trained seriously after the age of 16.