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.
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 love the way you love, but I hate the way I’m supposed to love you back.
This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose – this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death.
Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude-but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.
For those who’ve never experienced a sunrise in the rural midwest, it’s roughly as soft and romantic as someone’s abruptly hitting the lights in a dark room.
American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.