Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.
Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.
Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.
A great book should leave you with many experiences.
I discovered that I had, in the past two decades, written a far greater amount in the essay form than I remembered. Certainly I have written enough of it to demonstrate that I harbor no disdain for literary journalism or just plain journalism, under whose sponsorship I have been able to express much that has fascinated me, or alarmed me, or amused me, or otherwise engaged my attention when I was not writing a book.
It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time — for jittery people.
My life and work have been far from free of blemish, and so I think it would be unpardonable for a biographer not to dish up the dirt.
Perhaps the critics are right: this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation-who cares? The writer will be dead before anyone can judge him-but he must go on writing, reflecting disorder, defeat, despair, should that be all he sees at the moment, but ever searching for the elusive love, joy, and hope-qualities which, as in the act of life itself, are best when they have to be struggled for, and are not commonly come by with much ease, either by a critic's formula or by a critic's yearning.
I think it's unfortunate to have critics for friends.
I felt a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility - as if my body had actually become frail, hypersensitive and somehow disjointed and clumsy, lacking normal coordination. And soon I was in the throes of a pervasive hypochondria.
Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can't quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.
I think that the best of my generation...have reversed the customary rules of the game and have grown more radical as they have gotten older - a disconcerting but healthy sign. To be sure, there are many youngish old fogies around and even the most illustrious of these, William Buckley, is blessed by a puzzling, recondite but undeniable charm, almost as if beneath that patrician exterior an egalitarian was signaling to get out.
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