The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

My grandmother refused to concede that any member of the family died of natural causes. An uncle's cancer in middle age occurred because all the suitcases fell off the luggage rack onto him when he was in his teens, and so forth. Death was an acquired characteristic.

Do you realize how angry you sound?” must be one of the most infuriating questions in the language.

Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.

Nice criticism is good when it tells you something. A lot of negative "criticism" isn't criticism at all: it's just nasty, "writerly" cliché and invective.

Writing about writing is a bit like talking about a conversation you are having; it tends to obscure desperation about where the next word is coming from.

It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.