Death Persecutes Before It Executes.

One Reason Writers Write Is Out Of Revenge. Life Hurts; Certain Ideas And Experiences Hurt; One Wants To Clarify, To Set Out Illuminations, To Replay The Old Bad Scenes And Get The Treppenworte Said -- The Words One Didn't Have The Strength Or Ripeness To Say When Those Words Were Necessary For One's Dignity Or Survival.

Of Comic Novels That Have Quaffed The Elixir Of 'classic': Zuleika Dobson By Max Beerbohm.

In Real Life Wishing, Divorced From Willing, Is Sterile And Begets Nothing.

What's Impossible Not To Notice, Though - It's All Around Us - Is The Diminution Of American Prose: How Pedestrian It Has Become. Pick Up Any Short Story And Listen To Its Voice, The Tedious Easy Vernacular That Mistakes Transcription For Realism. This Would Display An Understandable Pragmatism If It Were A Pandering To Common-denominator Readers; But It Is, In Fact, A Kind Of Hifalultin Literary Ideology, The Less-is-more Hemingway Legacy Put Through An Up-to-the-minute Industrial Blender.

I Can't Claim To Be Disenchanted "with The Current State Of Fiction" Because I Read So Little Of It. My Reading Is Mostly Drawn To History.