THE BEST METAPHOR I know of for being a fiction writer is in Don DeLillo’s Mao II, where he describes a book-in-progress as a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, forever c...
Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my n...
Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.
a manual for how to build a mentally ill child
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships...
For some reason I was reluctant to ask anybody what had happened. I hate being the person who always doesn't know what's going on and has to ask somebody; it always seems like everybody else knows wha...
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.
What if there was something essentially wrong with Claude Sylvanshine that wasn't wrong with other people? What if he was simple ill-suited, the way some people are born without limbs or certain organ...
Anybody gets to ask questions about any fiction-related issues she wants. No question about literature is stupid. You are forbidden to keep yourself from asking a question or making a comment because...
It’s hard to get good answers to why most Young Voters are so uninterested in politics. This is probably because it’s next to impossible to get someone to think hard about why he’s not interested in s...
People hate people, not freedom.
If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people.
Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the defini...
This also explains why the amazingly lifelike Al Gore, over in the Democratic race, has been so relentlessly Negative and depressing in his attacks on Bill Bradley. Since Gore, like the Shrub, has his...
There are very few innocent sentences in writing.
If what's always distinguished bad writing--flat characters, a narrative world that's clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.--is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an inge...
Q: What do you think is magical about fiction?DFW: ... The first line of attack for that question is that there is this existential loneliness in the real world. I don't know what you're thinking or w...
Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.