My contention is that that style is just as stylized as an ornate style.

So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions.

Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that.

I'm trying to make sure that there's comedy as well as sadness. It makes the sadness more memorable.

Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like.

I always wanted to write something illustrated, and the Details strip finally gave me the opportunity.

It's also true, however, that having conquered the regional writer ghetto, I am now intent on conquering the nationalist writer ghetto and moving out into the world more.

What genre it falls under is only of interest later.

This is odd, but there are certain things that are really embarrassing to talk about - one is my job and the success that I've had in it, and the other is money.

It turns out that my memory is just not that great, so for specific scenes with people doing stuff, sometimes I'd have the details all wrong or I couldn't remember what happened exactly, so I just let that be.

I suppose I should say that I treasure blasphemy, as a faith of the highest order.

But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now.

I'm trying to read more dead people because I keep having to read stuff for juries and so forth.

My grandfather was a newspaper publisher and his paper had all the comics in NYC, so some of my earliest memories are of reading the family paper and heading straight for the comics insert.

I love comic books and always did as a kid.

Writing the book was itself a process of concealing and revealing.

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.

When prose gets too stylized and out of control - and Stein is sometimes a good example - when you don't know what the hell is going on, then it's kind of boring.

I have worked really hard to defy categorization, to break down a taxonomy whenever it comes my way.

I made this list of stuff that it's time for me to try to do.

The point is to balance on the edge between musicality and content.

Literature precedes genre.

All the stuff that I used to treat with contempt - you know, I'm an artist, man, I don't do that family stuff - has begun to seem really important.

The Ice Storm, because of the movie, has had, or is to have, a vigorous life in other cultures.

I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I'm trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century.

Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life.

I turned forty, and I'm finally going to get married and maybe have a kid.

I didn't know how to kill off a character unless I was able, as a narrator, to get really complicated. Because it was a big deal. I'd never killed a character before.

My contention is that that style is just as stylized as an ornate style.

I judged about a zillion awards this year so I've been reading a lot of books that just came out.

A bed is where a sense of shared purpose first takes root.

Impotence fetishism bisexuality and bondage are all facts of life and our fiction should reflect that.

Contention is inseparable from creating knowledge. It is not contention we should try to avoid, but discourses that attempt to suppress contention.

It is my contention that civil disobediences are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and that they are thus quite in tune with the oldest traditions of the country.

It is my contention that most people are not mugged every day, that most people in this world do not encounter violence every day. I think we prepare people for violence, and I think just as importantly we prepare people for the definition of being gentle.

There are no contests in the Art of Peace. A true warrior is invincible because he or she contests with nothing. Defeat means to defeat the mind of contention that we harbor within.

Nobody wants to see teams out of contention showcased in December and January. I'm sure this is something that will be discussed again this off-season.

George Orwell's contention was that it is a sure sign of trouble when things can no longer be called by their right names and described in plain, forthright speech.

It is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. hares have no time to read.

We have seen that no religion stands on the basis of things known; none bounds its horizon within the field of human observation; and, therefore, as it can never present us with indisputable facts, so must it ever be at once a source of error and contention.

In real life, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game.

While we have entertained the contention that a deed may make more propaganda than hundreds of speeches, thousands of articles, and tens of thousands of pamphlets, we have held that an arbitrary act of violence will not necessarily have such an effect.

I don't think nationalism is alone holding the field; it's in contention with a lot of different things.

What is public history but a register of the successes and disappointments, the vices, the follies and the quarrels of those who engage in contention for power.

My contention is that that style is just as stylized as an ornate style.

Contention existed before the earth was formed.

The generic Canadian style of illustration is different from the generic American style.

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.