A Book Should Be An Axe To

His Mind Has Become A Refuge For Old Thoughts, Idle, Indigent, With Nowhere Else To Go. He Ought To Chase Them Out, Sweep The Premises Clean. But He Does Not Care To Do So, Or Does Not Care Enough"(72).

Nothing Is Worse Than What We Can Imagine.

In Its Conception The Literature Prize Belongs To Days When A Writer Could Still Be Thought Of As, By Virtue Of His Or Her Occupation, A Sage, Someone With No Institutional Affiliations Who Could Offer An Authoritative Word On Our Times As Well As On Our Moral Life.

There Is First Of All The Problem Of The Opening, Namely, How To Get Us From Where We Are, Which Is, As Yet, Nowhere, To The Far Bank. It Is A Simple Bridging Problem, A Problem Of Knocking Together A Bridge. People Solve Such Problems Every Day. They Solve Them, And Having Solved Them Push On.

If There Were A Better, Clearer, Shorter Way Of Saying What The Fiction Says, Then Why Not Scrap The Fiction?