When I went to first grade and the other children said that their fathers were farmers, I simply didn't believe them. I agreed in order to be polite, but in my heart I knew that those men were impostors, as farmers and as fathers, too. In my youthful estimation, Laurence Cook defined both categories. To really believe that others even existed in either category was to break the First Commandment.

Progressivism is usually seen as a stepping back from individualism into a progressive community...

Your sons weren't made to like you. That's what grandchildren are for.

There are several methods for introducing your children to driving, and all of them are bad. Probably the worst is to put it off.

Some novelists are luckier than others in the eras of their formative intellectual years, but all Weltanschauungs return, which means that most novelists have at least a chance of a revival.

The novel as a form is usually seen to be moral if its readers consider freedom, individuality, democracy, privacy, social connection, tolerance and hope to be morally good, but it is not considered moral if the highest values of a society are adherence to rules and traditional mores, the maintenance of hierarchical relationships, and absolute ideas of right and wrong. Any society based on the latter will find novels inherently immoral and subversive.

Whatever you love is beautiful; love comes first, beauty follows. The greater your capacity for love, the more beauty you find in the world.