Who'd want to be a modernist writer in the English-speaking world?

It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves.

The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.

The life of the professional writer - like that of any freelance, whether she be a plumber or a podiatrist - is predicated on willpower. Without it there simply wouldn't be any remuneration, period.

What more chilling indictment of the modern world is there than this: that the condition of the smartphone user is that of a dumb animal. Moooo!

I'm English enough to feel something of a gut-reaction to modernism, to continental philosophising and anything that smacks of a refusal to pay attention to the forensics: the empirical facts on the ground.