I think that the best of my generation...have reversed the customary rules of the game and have grown more radical as they have gotten older - a disconcerting but healthy sign. To be sure, there are many youngish old fogies around and even the most illustrious of these, William Buckley, is blessed by a puzzling, recondite but undeniable charm, almost as if beneath that patrician exterior an egalitarian was signaling to get out.

Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.

For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.

In Vineyard Haven, on Martha's Vineyard, mostly I love the soft collision here of harbor and shore, the subtly haunting briny quality that all small towns have when they are situated on the sea

And when you get an eminent journal like Time magazine complaining, as it often has, that to the young writers of today life seems short on rewards and that what they write is a product of their own neuroses, in its silly way the magazine is merely stating the status quo and obvious truth. The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.

Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.