The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination. Sex can no longer be the germ, the seed of fiction. Sex is an episode, most properly conveyed in an episodic manner, quickly, often ironically.
Letters are useful as a means of expressing the ideal self. . . .
In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires. . . . The language of the younger generation. . . has the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power . . . . It is military, theatrical, and at its most coherent probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism. Scroll down for sources of quotations and special search engines. Choose from a dozen bookstores in English, French and German.