It is impossible to imagine a less complacent major writer.
"I remember Nicklaus talking in the late '80s or early '90s that the players out here are not hungry enough and everybody was complacent and writers were writing about how nobody wanted to win and nobody would ever dominate again.
Perhaps as a form of shock therapy for a bourgeois society they considered hopelessly complacent, these writers sometimes drove Christian beliefs to the extremes that asceticism always risks, and sometimes their outlook tipped over into fin de siècle decadence and political apocalypticism.
"Like other provincial cities, Santiago can be very complacent," the Galician writer Miguel Anxo Murado told me.
West is also subtle as a lethally complacent Trigorin, the writer in The Seagull who throws his pages to his readers as if to lions, regarding them all as potential enemies.
Revolutions, if that is what the protests add up to, as this book passionately argues, can make fools of excited writers as well as complacent politicians.
Both Rushdie and Doctorow were trying to point out that the American writer held an uninformed and complacent view of his heavily militarised – indeed, insanely nuclearised – state.
Whether we're readers or writers, none of us can afford to get complacent.
In the season finale of his recently released Netflix mini-series, Master of None, writer and comedian Aziz Ansari grapples with the tendency to become complacent, what John Gardner characterized as lack of self-renewal.
Sometimes the writers attempt a little winsome humour to make themselves sound less complacent.
