I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.

When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.

I am a cigarette with a body attached to it

It's akin to style, what I'm talking about, but it isn't style alone. It is the writer's particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There's plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

In short, everything about his life was different for him at the bottom of that well.

I’d like to go out in the front yard and shout something. “None of this is worth it!” That’s what I’d like people to hear.

Writers will be judged by what they write.