Some Old Tom Wolfe

"The introduction of realism into literature in the 18th century...was like the introduction of electricity into engineering....For writers to give up this power in the quest of a more up-to-date kind of fiction -- it is as if an engineer were to set out to develop a more sophisticated machine technology by first of all discarding the principle of electricity, on the grounds that it has been used ad nauseum for a hundred years." - Tom Wolfe, Harpers, Nov. 1989