"The classical things are really quite marvelous, you know. It's just they have degenerated into a kind of "well-made-story" of our time. But you could learn forever from them. Look at Maupassant's very short stories. Those wonderful short stories about soldiers. They are just beautiful. He could do everything in three pages. And academics, of course, were scared to use those to teach kids to write, cause they'd never learn how to make the "well-made-story.""