No Nostalgia Runs Deeper Than

The Decisive Moment In The Defeat Of Upper Class, Capital-s, Society May Have Come When, In Newspapers All Over The Nation, What Used To Be Call The Society Page Was Replaced By The Style Section.

What Distinguishes Us One From Another Is Our Dreams, And What We Do To Make Them Come About.

I Was Recently Asked What It Takes To Become A Writer. Three Things, I Answered: First, One Must Cultivate Incompetence At Almost Every Other Form Of Profitable Work. This Must Be Accompanied, Second, By A Haughty Contempt For All The Forms Of Work That One Has Established One Cannot Do. To These Two Must Be Joined, Third, The Nuttiness To Believe That Other People Can Be Made To Care About Your Opinions And Views And Be Charmed By The Way You State Them. Incompetence, Contempt, Lunacy—once You Have These In Place, You Are Set To Go.

I Am Basically A Complainer And All The Grounds For Complaint Have Been Swept Out From Under Me.

While Reading Writers Of Great Formulatory Power — Henry James, Santayana, Proust — I Find I Can Scarcely Get Through A Page Without Having To Stop To Record Some Lapidary Sentence. Reading Henry James, For Example, I Have Muttered To Myself, "c’mon, Henry, Turn Down The Brilliance A Notch, So I Can Get Some Reading Done." I May Be One Of A Very Small Number Of People Who Have Developed Writer’s Cramp While Reading.