Any decent writer sees his first concern as the rendering of what he takes to be permanent in human nature, and this holds true no matter how 'contemporary' his material. Now and again he may feel that there are some political causes too vast or urgent to be subordinated to mere literature, and will allow one or other such to determine the shape of what he writes. But by doing so he will have been guilty of betrayal. He will have accelerated the arrival of the day on which it is generally agreed that a novel or a poem or a play is no more than a system of generalizations orchestrated in terms of plot and diction and situation and the rest; the day, in other words, on which the novel, the poem, and the play cease to exist, and that is the worst prospect of all.
—Kingsley Amis, "Lone Voices," 1960, collected in What Became of Jane Austen?
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