How Can We Expect Novelists

Underneath All His Writing There Is The Settled Determination To Use Certain Words, To Take Certain Attitudes, To Produce A Certain Atmosphere; What He Is Seeing Or Thinking Or Feeling Has Hardly Any Influence On The Way He Writes. The Reader Can Reply, Ironically, "that's What It Means To Have A Style"; But Few People Have So Much Of One, Or One So Obdurate That You Can Say Of It, "it Is A Style That No Subject Can Change.

Christina Stead Has A Chinese Say, "our Old Age Is Perhaps Life's Decision About Us" Or, Worse, The Decision We Have Made About Ourselves Without Ever Realizing We Were Making It.

The Novel Is A Prose Narrative Of Some Length That Has Something Wrong With It.

The Ways We Miss Our Lives Are Life.

From My Mother's Sleep I Fell Into The State, And I Hunched In Its Belly Till My Wet Fur Froze. Six Miles From Earth, Loosed From The Dream Of Life, I Woke To Black Flak And The Nightmare Fighters. When I Died They Washed Me Out Of The Turret With A Hose.