Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose. In conversation, those uneasy eyes upon you, those lips ready with an emendation before you have begun to speak, are a powerful deterrent to unreality, even to hope. In art it is not often possible to make direct use of your dreams of tomorrow and your excuses for yesterday. In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires - this is a benevolent form. The ideal self expressed in letters is not a crudely sugary affair except in dreary personalities; in any case the ideal is very much a part of the character, having its twenty-four hours a day to get through, and being no less unique in its combinations than one's fingerprints.

Gertrude Stein, all courage and will, is a soldier of minimalism. Her work, unlike the resonating silences in the art of Samuel Beckett, embodies in its loquac…

The private and serious drama of guilt is not often a useful one for fiction today and its disappearance, following perhaps the disappearance from life, appear…

There's a leveling homogeneity in America today created by television. Each day it passes over the vast land mass, over the states nudging each other like the …

Je veux qu'on me voit en ma facon simple, naturelle, et ordinaire, sans etude et artifice; car c'est moi que je peins...Je suis moi-meme la matiere de mon livr…

By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by oth…

We expect you are, honest Shaun, we agreed, but from franking machines, limricked, that in the end it may well turn out, we hear to be you, our belated, who wi…