1) “Novel writing has an entrepreneurial element: to invent a central story which can function simultaneously as a plausible action and as an emblematic or symbolic one is akin to inventing a new machine or product, a patent that will run and run.”
(Good writers are like plucky entrepreneurs.)
2) “Unreliable narration is almost entrepreneurially efficient: once the novelist has set up his stall, he can syndicate his technique in chapter after chapter.”
(Ditto.)
3) “Realism produces surrealism; it funds its own defaulters.”
(Realism is like a bank.)
4) “Realism is a lenient tutor; it schools its own truants.”
(But sometimes realism needs to be like a schoolmaster, too.)
5) “It is precisely what the novel-form exists for, how it justifies its difference as a genre, earns its genre-salary.”
(The novel is a white-collar employee.)
6) "Aesthetics, I believe, does not really exist - it is always a form of criticism - and so all aesthetic arguments need to stop at local stations. The discussion of specific works is the only valid aesthetics."
(Criticism is a kind of trainspotting.)
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