The best comedy is always heartless, an alternative to rational emotion. - Wilfrid Sheed

It's the old case against symbols: if you get them, they seem obvious and artificial, and if you don't, you miss the whole point.

As enviable and unreachable as a face in a train window.

It is possible that the malice of writers has been overrated (by myself among others). Reading their ruminations on their craft, one sees why this writer could not possibly like that one, would indeed consider him a menace. Literature is a battleground of conflicting faiths, and nobler passions than envy are involved.