Status Updates From Living by Fiction: A Classi...

"Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it." (pg. 78)

"Language is weighted with referents. It is like a beam of light on Venus. There, on Venus, heavy atmospheric gravity bends light around the entire circumference of the planet, enabling a man, in theory to see the back of his own head. Now, the object of every artist's vision is, in one sense, the back of his own head." (p.50)

"Before the Romantic revolution, characters try to advance themselves; after it, they try to save themselves." (p.39)