Time & Perspective Quote by Moses Hadas

Gratitude and insult land in the same envelope here, and that’s the point. Moses Hadas stages a perfect little social assassination: he opens with the expected civility of author-to-author exchange, then flips the idiom. “Waste no time” is supposed to signal eagerness, a promise of attention; Hadas reroutes it into a declaration that the book itself is the waste. The cruelty is in the efficiency. No rant, no argument, no plea for standards - just a neat inversion that lets the reader do the humiliating math.

The subtext is a commentary on literary politeness as a kind of theater. Writers are meant to thank each other, blurbs are currency, and even tepid praise keeps the machine running. Hadas refuses the transaction. By using the etiquette script, he exposes how thin it is: the “thank you” isn’t warmth, it’s a ritual that can be weaponized. The line also signals confidence bordering on contempt - a critic’s posture compressed into one sentence, implying not only that the book is bad, but that its badness is obvious enough to require no evidence.

Contextually, it sits in that midcentury tradition of epistolary barbs and salon cruelty, when intellectuals sparred with aphorisms and reputation was defended with a sharpened quip. It works because it’s plausible as manners until the last two words, where the smile shows teeth.