There Was A Time When We Expected

There Was A Time When We Expected Nothing Of Our Children But Obedience, As Opposed To The Present, When We Expect Everything Of Them But Obedience.

Aphorisms Are Bad For Novels. They Stick In The Reader's Teeth.

An Aphorism Is A Generalization Of Sorts, And Our Present-day Writers Seem More At Home With The Particular.

Sex Almost Always Disappoints Me In Novels. Everything Can Be Said Or Done Now, And That's What I Often Find: Everything, A Feeling Of Generality Or Dispersal. But In My Experience, True Sex Is So Particular, So Peculiar To The Person Who Yearns For It. Only He Or She, And No One Else, Would Desire So Very Much That Very Person Under Those Circumstances. In Fiction, I Miss That Sense Of Terrific Specificity.

Ruefulness Is One Of The Classical Tones Of American Fiction. It Fosters A Native, Deglamorized Form Of Anxiety.