The author should be present everywhere in the work but visible nowhere, like God in creation: felt as a shaping force while withholding direct opinion, judgment, and personal sentiment from the page. The writer's own feelings are raw material to be transmuted, not displayed.
Prose should be pursued with the exactness of verse, each sentence weighed for sound and rhythm by reading it aloud until it passes the test of the voice. This makes composition slow and physically punishing: pages rewritten for days to reach a single phrase that cannot be otherwise.
A regular, bourgeois, almost monastic daily existence is treated not as the enemy of intensity but as its precondition: domestic calm frees the mind for extremity on the page. Dissipation in life is seen as draining the energy that should go into art.
A book about nothing, held together by the internal force of its style rather than by any inherently interesting topic, is posed as the highest ambition. Beautiful subjects are suspect because they let the writer lean on the material instead of on craft.