The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in.
The miracle is that a work of art should live in the person who reads it.
If you can make the reader laugh he is apt to get careless and go on reading.
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.
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.