Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life. And so on and on. You have only to teach literature to realize that most young readers are poor noticers. I know from my own old books, wantonly annotated twenty years ago when I was a student, that I routinely underlined for approval details and images and metaphors that strike me now as commonplace, while serenely missing things that now seem wonderful. We grow, as readers, and twenty- year-olds are relative virgins. They have not yet read enough literature to be taught by it how to read it.

A great deal of nonsense is written every day about characters in fiction - from the side of those who believe too much in character and from the side of those who believe too little. Those who believe too much have an iron set of prejudices about what characters are:we should get to "know" them; they should not be "stereotypes;" they should have an"inside" as well as an outside, depth as well as surface; they should "grow" and " develop", and they should be nice. So they should be pretty much like us.

I think that novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or deep enough, but when the novel in question has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality level.