Great Regulars: I can't say that I take all this dire

grousing about the decline in reading all that seriously. Doesn't anyone remember that, when they were in high school--and I was in high school half a century ago--the kids who read a lot were … in a minority? This idea that, not so many years ago, everybody, including kids, were reading up a storm is fantasy, as is the idea that young people nowadays don't read as much as young people used to.

from Frank Wilson: Conversations in the Book Trade: Frank Wilson--editor, critic (The Philadelphia Inquirer [retired])

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Rules are perfectly serviceable as guideposts, but can easily keep one from exploring the hinterlands of life and the imagination. It is precisely because the master craftsman knows the rules so well that he knows when to forego them. The saint is too absorbed in the pursuit of love to worry much about sin. In art, a preoccupation with rules leads to mannerism. Puritanism is the mannerism of religion.

from Frank Wilson: When Falls the Coliseum: Look at the moon, not at the finger

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