There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience.

I took a little celebrational nap.

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.

Most movies are not very good. Most people know it and like to see them anyway.

Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.

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.

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