I want to make money, and I would like to have a lot of money, but I still believe that the only reason to write is that somehow it will make something or somebody better.
Despite all that I know rationally, and everything that I can put into words, I can say that I have difficulty giving up the notion of the nobility of art.
You have to suspend thinking in narratives. The moment you are conscious of yourself the gap opens up. And in this gap, stories are generated.
I’ve never meditated for a moment in my life. I don’t know how it works. But one of the things you have to do to put yourself in the meditating mode is stop narrating yourself to yourself.
One of the many conditions that have to be met for a brain to become a mind, and therefore have consciousness, is ‘the analog I’ around which all the simultaneous inflow of sensations and stimulations are reflected and organized.
We, as writers, have to figure out a way to create a consciousness in language. It’s crazy even to attempt to do that.
What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness – in a sense, we have to do it for the first time, every time.
I like to blow up this notion that all we have to do as writers and artists is represent reality, which is presumably solid and self-evident, with no negotiation of the gap between myself and the world, between this body and this space, which needs narration to close it.
Anything that might come under arts should not be subject to the whims of the idiotic market because the market’s stupid, and it gravitates toward simplicity – towards essentializing things so they can be sold.
I don’t think that everyone should have a philosophical answer to any given question. There are things that need to be done.
Wherever there’s capitalism there’s this inclination toward simplicity. There’s also a human need to process complicated things by turning them into something else.
What I don’t like about America is not necessarily an American thing; it’s a capitalist thing. This is the Vatican of capitalism.
I cannot think of a country in which I would be happy with the government and dominant ideology and available propaganda.
I believe people are much more complicated than they can handle.
If you find yourself as a person in unfamiliar territory, you will grasp on to what is already familiar.
There’s no bad writing; you did something. I was operating inside language, and I did something. I’m not ashamed of it.
You don’t want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.
I started appreciating and valuing different things. Some things just became insufferable to me, and not just literature. I used to like horror movies and now I couldn’t stand them.
Chicago has very few public spaces where people are encouraged to get together. It’s partly to prevent riots, and also to segregate a city with a history of racial segregation.
What I was interested in is the lens organizing my sovereign space. I avoid the term outsider and also exile for the same reason. Outsider implies a kind of nobility.