None of his words just came out anymore. Every syllable had to be weighed and measured. Each was calibrated to trigger laughter or to dominate or to earn him a dollar.

It sounds trite, but only because words make everything true sound trite. Because words always screw up whatever you’re trying to say.

fact-bound writer can’t go: worlds of imagination, rumination and fantasy. In return we enter into a more forgiving contract with him, allowing him to come at his subject slowly, discursively, obliquely, elliptically or just plain densely if that’s his vision. Density, in fact, is one of the qualities that William Faulkner’s fans most like about

so the standards of cheapness and convenience, which are irresistibly simplifying and therefore inevitably exploitive, have been substituted for the standard of health (of both people and land), which would enforce consideration of essential complexities.