Stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.
Nothing brings you together like a common enemy.
The point of books is to combat loneliness.
It’s in the democratic citizen’s nature to be like a leaf that doesn’t believe in the tree it’s part of.
The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still “are” human beings, now. Or can be.
The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I’ll hush.
This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn’t engage anybody.
For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we’re in port.
If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.
I just think that fiction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t art.
The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’
This is nourishing, redemptive we become less alone inside.
Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?
The fun of reading as “an exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff we can’t normally talk about.”
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.
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.
It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.
There is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.
Ideally, each piece of art’s its own unique object, and its evaluation’s always present-tense.
This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.