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

In the strange heat all litigation brings to bear on things, the very process of litigation fosters the most profound misunderstandings in the world.

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 time for prizes and competitions at art festivals is over. Competition is too closely tied to values that are alien to the arts.

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.

People have been modeling their lives after films for years, but the medium is somehow unsuited to moral lessons, cautionary tales or polemics of any kind.