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.

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.

Moral self-infatuation has its own corruptions, after all. With time, almost every other principle of the magazine acquired an ironic echo, a sort of cackling aftermath.

There are times when every act, no matter how private and unconscious, becomes political.

Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love- you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you're over. You've caught the rhythm of them once and for all, in your sleep at night. The city, of course, can wreck it. So much insomnia. So many rhythms collide. The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind. Some people are indifferent to dislike, even relish it. Hardly anyone I know.

There are so many different types of writers. It's just sheer coincidence that they're all called writers.

Self-pity” is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative.