Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.
There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond this there is great unrest.
Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.
People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves.
The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.
What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.