Some things Richard Yates said (according to Blake Bailey).

 

-Read Jane Austen, “who had balls.”

-Avoid Katherine Mansfield, “who didn’t” (have balls).

-Gina Berriault had “balls to spare”.

-Cheever was a “dirty old man” who wrote about farts and so forth, and his slick prose didn’t compensate for the sprawl of his work.

-“Don’t be seduced by prose, the point is structure”

-John O’Hara is the same as Cheever.

-Ulysses was far better than Finnegan’s Wake.

-Billy Bud was better than Moby Dick because the latter sprawled.

-A High Wind in Jamaica and Invisible Man were wonderful, classically structured novels.

-Characters shouldn’t be too ‘knowy’ about themselves; rather they should reveal themselves obliquely, like the narrator’s in Ford’s A Good Soldier or Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

-Avoid ‘privacy’ and ‘preciousness’ –neither fiction nor poetry is ‘a letter home’.

-Honesty is not, per se, a virtue (remember what Anatole France…