Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
Sweet, women make it true. I think women are the best artists of the world, for they can take the common lives of men solid with the money-getting of our age, and make them beautiful.
But hold up for a minute: who is this “we” that’s always turning up in
critical writing? We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority. It’s the voice of the middlebrow male critic, the one who truly believes he knows how everyone else should think. We is corrupt. We is make-believe. The real question is this: can I love the art but hate the artist? Can you?
When I say “we,” I mean I. I mean you.