All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment. - Eudora Welty

If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?

The novel's outside world, if well enough created, does live on, when you look at the world of Jane Austen, Flaubert, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Proust! They're indelible. War and Peace is not only real to today's reader, it will outlast him too.

Every writer, like everybody else, thinks he's living through the crisis of the ages. To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.