�Literary Occasions�: The Critical Is Personal

�Literary Occasions�: The Critical Is Personal: "''The wish to be a writer didn't go with a wish or a need actually to write. It went only with the idea I had been given of the writer, a fantasy of nobility.''
''My father worshiped writing and writers. He made the vocation of the writer seem the noblest in the world; and I decided to be that noble thing.''
''I couldn't truly call myself a reader. I had never had the capacity to lose myself in a book; like my father, I could read only in little bits . . . I hadn't begun to think in any concrete way about what I might write. Yet I continued to think of myself as a writer.'' "