"Writing is not "the establishment of a professional reputation" as if one were a doctor or lawyer; it is not properly…"

"The private and serious drama of guilt is not often a useful one for fiction today and its disappearance, following p…"

"Sex, without society as its landscape, has never been of much interest to fiction."

"Manhattan is not altogether felicitous for fiction. It is not a city of memory, not a family city, not the capital of…"

"There's a leveling homogeneity in America today created by television. Each day it passes over the vast land mass, ov…"

"Gertrude Stein, all courage and will, is a soldier of minimalism. Her work, unlike the resonating silences in the art…"

"Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite s…"

"Biographers, the quick in pursuit of the dead, research, organize, fill in, contradict, and make in this way a sort o…"

"She never liked the constant presence of her husbands or lovers and did not like, she soon found out, to be alone — a…"

"In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin – consideration of their feelings. And it usually turns out t…"