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.

A favorite strategy was the paragraph-terminating: Right? Followed immediately by Wrong. This linear invitation to a mugging was considered a strategy of wit.

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.

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.

Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation.

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