Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about in literature.

Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?

Nothing defines the quality of life in a community more clearly than people who regard themselves, or whom the consensus chooses to regard, as mentally unwell.

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.

I took a little celebrational nap.

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.

That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.