Sublime

In himself man is essentially a beast, only he butters it over like a slice of bread with a little decorum.

“And yet, the ‘creative’ half of the title suggests an impulse rather than Enlightenment perspicuity motivates the writer and shapes the writing.”

«THE JOURNALIST AND THE MURDERER», DI JANET MALCOLM

My publisher was rather uncomfortable with this section.

I also tried to stop using phrases like “of course” and adverbs like “surprisingly,” “predictably,” “understandably” and “ironically,” which place a value on a sentence before the reader has a chance to read it. Readers, I learned, are not as dumb as the writer thinks; they must be given room to play their role in the act of writing—to discover for

A wide experience of actual intellectual affairs will lead most people to the conclusion that logic is mainly valuable as a weapon wherewith to exterminate logicians.

But it also feels true that the contemporary novel is having a crisis of morality. Not in the Aesop’s fable sort of way. But in the way that a novel is supposed to capture the specific, particular instability of human relations, and in that instability, it captures the truth about what it is to live in the world. And it feels more and more that whe

Shall I make him the narrator of his own tale?"