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We judge a work on its integrity. Often we examine a work’s integrity (or at least I do) by asking what it makes for itself and what it attempts to borrow from the world. Sentimental art, for instance, attempts to force preexistent emotions upon us. Instead of creating characters and events which w…

Fiction can deal with all the world’s objects and ideas together, with the breadth of human experience in time and space; it can deal with things the limited disciplines of thought either ignore completely or destroy by methodological caution, our most pressing concerns: personality, family, death,…

This is, ultimately, a book about the world. It inquires about the world’s meaning. It attempts to do unlicensed metaphysics in a teacup. The teacup at hand, in this case, is contemporary fiction.

Why read fiction to think about the world? You may, like most of us most of the time, read fiction …

When you write, you feel how it must be, you know that at such a spot a certain thing is needed, at another spot something else; you compose pictures for yourself that you see, you have rather the feeling that you are going to bring something to flower; you feel it in your heart like the distant ec…

The secret of being happy consists of knowing how to enjoy yourself -- enjoy being at table, in bed, enjoy standing up, sitting down, enjoy the nearest ray of sunshine, the slightest bit of landscape: in other words, love everything. Thus it follows that to be happy you must already be so -- there'…