“Great Expectations and Middlemarch can’t be done now. They don’t feel to me like the atmosphere I’m living in now. I’m with William Carlos Williams and Joyce and others; whatever I’m ‘saying’ I have to give the feeling of time now, the multiple disastrous world now, the world that came awfully and finally out of World War II. But Great Expectations and Middlemarch – they show people losing their true centers, going after money or status or displaced ideals, letting errors multiply, self-deception, self-punishment even. Great novels. I reread them. They move me. They add to me. I see how the whole thing works out (more maybe than any book can pretend to today) – but it is that whole process that adds to me, not an abstractable credo or assent. A novel isn’t a sermon or a moral program – excuse the truism. My step-grandfather, who came from Maine, thought the old copybook maxims were the way to teach you how to live. I thought about this, this conviction of his; but the fact that it was a conviction of his told me more than any of the actual maxims ever could.”

(Joseph McElroy, interview with Tom LeClair in Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists (1983), p. 246.)