Fiction, I Believed, Was The Transmutation Of

Without Privacy There Was No Point In Being An Individual.

I Can't Stomach Any Kind Of Notion That Serious Fiction Is Good For Us, Because I Don't Believe That Everything That's Wrong With The World Has A Cure.

Everything He'd Done With Regard To Her In The Last Three Years Had Been Calculated To Foreclose The Intensely Personal Sort Of Talks They'd Had When He Was Younger: To Get Her To Shut Up, To Train Her To Contain Herself, To Make Her Stop Pestering Him With Her Overfull Heart And Her Uncensored Self. And Now That The Training Was Complete And She Was Obediently Trivial With Him, He Felt Bereft Of Her And Wanted To Undo It.

The Place Of Stillness That You Have To Go To To Write, But Also To Read Seriously, Is The Point Where You Can Actually Make Responsible Decisions, Where You Can Actually Engage Productively With An Otherwise Scary And Unmanageable World.

Just As The Camera Draws A Stake Through The Heart Of Serious Portraiture, Television Has Killed The Novel Of Social Reportage.