 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. |
| Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se. |
| 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. |
| The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush. |
| Fiction's about what it is to be a human being. |
| 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. |
| It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one. |
| 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 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? |
| 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. |
| This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants. |
| Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes. |
| 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. |
| 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? |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody. |
