A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by "progress." They became traveling salesmen of metaphors. |
Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth. |
Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth. |
Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want. |
His father, Vincent, took him to La Coupole in Paris and, after sitting on the terrace for a while, walked off and forgot him. It was the perfect start in life for a writer. |
His father, Vincent, took him to La Coupole in Paris and, after sitting on the terrace for a while, walked off and forgot him. It was the perfect start in life for a writer. |
If a book is really good, it deserves to be read again, and if it's great, it should be read at least three times. |
If a book is really good, it deserves to be read again, and if it's great, it should be read at least three times. |
It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave. |
Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words. |
People have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other's work. |
Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city. |
Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety. |
She was a spendthrift of the spirit, an American in Paris when, as Evelyn Waugh said, the going was good. |
The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles. |