Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity.

It's a pretty brutal process, having a baby.

What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?

The 'good' mother, with her fixed smile, her rigidity, her goody-goody outlook, her obsession with unnecessary hygiene, is in fact a fool. It is the 'bad' mother, unafraid of a joke and a glass of wine, richly self-expressive, scornful of suburban values, who is, in reality, good.

Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.

There is a slovenly disrespect for truth and reality that has infected and cross-infected the arts; the values of entertainment are relentlessly in the ascendant, to the extent that it becomes virtually impossible to write a naturalistic fictional sentence without feeling that the fabric of that sentence is already compromised.

Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.