This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.

The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.

We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back - I mean, what's wrong with us?

Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.

I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.

The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.

The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do?

It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most "familiarity" is meditated and delusive.

For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire's still going.

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.

It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one.

One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.

Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.

The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be.

It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.

We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story.

I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.

TV's "real" agenda is to be "liked," because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it's its sole raison.

To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this.

The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody.

This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.

This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.

What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is "all it does" - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.

I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.

Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.

It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.

TV's 'real' agenda is to be 'liked,' because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. TV is completely unabashed about this; it's its sole raison.

The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still 'are' human beings, now. Or can be.

The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, 'then' what do we do?

We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life 'outside' the story changes the story.

What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is 'all it does' - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.

You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.

You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking.

Entertainment provides relief. Art provokes engagement.

Ideally each piece of arts its own unique object and its evaluations always present tense.

Fictions about what it is to be a human being.

Good fictions job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

The man who knows his limitations, has none.

When a solipsist dies, everything goes with him.

Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.

The chain of wedlock is so heavy that it takes two to carry it - and sometimes three.

I always knew I'd keep at it with the plodding doggedness that I used to master lump-less gravy and wriggle out of fitness classes; I always knew I'd get a zillion rejection slips. I figured I'd write part time while working various full-time office jobs, and maybe, maybe in my 50s, I'd be able to quit and try writing full time.

I maintain that the period during the first half of the 1990s, the period in which rising inequality reached its peak, was a period in which we came very, very close to a demagogic immobilization of racism in this society.

I feel like there's already a written narrative going on everywhere. All the different situations and realities you're in, like words floating by. It's something that I didn't start thinking about until recently, but you can hitch that ride, that narrative that's already been created. You just have to read it and write it down.

The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond; and must be polished, or the lustre of it will never appear.

I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.