Your discovery, as best as I can determine, is that there is an alternative which no one has hit upon. It is that one finding oneself in one of life's critical situations need not after all respond in one of the traditional ways. No. One may simply default. Pass. Do as one pleases, shrug, turn on one's heel and leave. Exit. Why after all need one act humanly?

A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.

Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.

Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.

But what physician has not had patients who don't make any sense at all? To tell the truth, they're our stock-in-trade. We talk and write about the ones we can make sense of.

In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.

Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.