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

The radical intelligence in the moderate position is the only place where the center holds. Or so it seems.

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.

My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind—like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing.

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.

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

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