The Lexicographer's Rules

"Age and outmoded purity and patience may kill sometimes. Old lady writers, without means, without Social Security, reading in bed all dayÑdear old Sibyls, almost forgotten, hardly called upon except perhaps at midnight by a drunken couple from a pad down the street. Failure is not funny. It is cockroaches on the service elevator, old men in carpet slippers waiting anxiously by the mail slots in the lobby, neighborhood walks where the shops, graphs of consumption, show only a clutter of broken vases, strings of cracked beads, dirty feathers, an old vaudevillian's memorable dinner jacket and decades of cast-off booksÑthe dust of ambition from which the eye turns away in misery."

—New York Review of Books. "The young, the active, rely upon themselves, or perhaps they are desperately thrown back upon themselves, literally. The drama of real life will not let down the prose writer. He can camp for a while in the sedgy valley of autobiography, of current happenings, of the exploration of his own sufferings and sensations, the record of people met, of national figures contemplated. There is beauty to be torn out of the event, the suicide, the murder case, the prize fight. The 'I,' undisguised, visits new regions for us and pours all his art into them. Life inspires. The confession, the revelation, are not reporting, nor even journalism. Real life is presented as if it were fiction."'

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