To me the purpose of art is to produce something alive...but with a separate, and of course one hopes, with an everlasting life of its own.
If you can make the reader laugh he is apt to get careless and go on reading.
The miracle is that a work of art should live in the person who reads it.
After fifty, one ceases to digest. As someone once said, "I just ferment my food now."
I can tell a good cowboy by the way he approaches a cow.
At my public school I had hated every other face for fear the owner was a lord, at university, I was to court the rich while doubting whether there should be great inequalities between incomes.