The Usefulness Of Madmen Is Famous: They

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.

Literature Is An Instrument Of A Culture, Not A Summary Of It.

Above All, A Book Is A Riverbank For The River Of Language. Language Without The Riverbank Is Only Television Talk - A Free Fall, A Loose Splash, A Spill.

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.

One Must Avoid Ambition In Order To Write. Otherwise Something Else Is The Goal: Some Kind Of Power Beyond The Power Of Language. And The Power Of Language, It Seems To Me, Is The Only Kind Of Power A Writer Is Entitled To.