Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit.

Most writers need a wound, either physical or spiritual.

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see. And the great satirists, like Swift and Dickens, tend to write about abuses and injustices that have already been partially corrected - you write about it after it's over.

You see tragedy requires persons of heroic stature. It works on the principle of people being more than humansuper-humanand also being only too human. But there just aren't many great figures around now, so the tragic mechanisms can't work.

America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn't sure what it was.

People are always talking on their phones, or looking at their phones, because they don't want to be alone with their thoughts.

It is quite an achievement. People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead.