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From Martin Amis:

"... What is a correspondence? Younger readers know what a phone message is, and what a fax is. They probably know what a letter is. But they don't know what a correspondence is. Words are not deeds. In published poems (we think first of Eliot's Jew), words edge closer to deeds. In Celine's anti-Semitic textbooks, words get as close to deeds as words can well get. Blood libels scrawled on front of doors are deeds. In a correspondence, words are hardly even words. They are soundless cries and whispers; 'gouts of bile', as Larkin characterized his political opinions; ways of saying 'Gloomy old sod, aren't I?' or, more simply, 'Grrr.' Correspondences are self-dramatizations. Above all, a word in a letter is never your last word on any subject.