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.

There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.

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.

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

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.