I don’t really know what it is I’ve done all my life, this wordworking.

Can women operate as women in a male institution without becoming imitation men?

Fantasy isn’t meliorative. The happy ending, however enjoyable to the reader, applies to the characters only; this is fiction, not prediction and not prescription.

Maybe that’s why I feel that I live in exile. I used to live in a country that had a future.

But the games of instantly rewarded destruction, in which the characters and action are ready-made “action figures” and the only goal is “winning,” are designed to be addictive, and therefore may be hard to outgrow or replace. Compelled into an endless, meaningless feedback loop, the imagination is starved and sterilized.

Of course the excellence of immediate, real impact, of an art that embodies the moment, is an excellent kind of excellence.

Subversion doesn’t suit people who, feeling their adjustment to life has been successful, want things to go on just as they are, or people who need support from authority assuring them that things are as they have to be.

Meaning in art isn’t the same as meaning in science. The meaning of the second law of thermodynamics, so long as the words are understood, isn’t changed by who reads it, or when, or where. The meaning of Huckleberry Finn is.

“Old Age Is Not for the Young.”