In God's body shop, each of us was customized. But science came along to substitute statistical inference for free will. We are now a tribe of likeli… - John Leonard

Everybody is forever saying that the essay is dead. This is always said in essays.

Every fall I imagine once again that something wonderful will happen at a party. This is like imagining that the telephone book will prove to be a wonderful novel.

The life, no matter how traumatic, never explains the work, if the work is any good. W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Doris Lessing, and Saul Bellow variously believed in faeries, funny money, flying saucers, and orgone energy accumulation, but so have millions of other people who never got around to writing even a mediocre poem or novel.