You might consider how to escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of w...
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...
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.
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...
There are very few innocent sentences in writing.
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...
People hate people, not freedom.
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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 is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only that pop culture cannot do but that are urgent now: one is that by creating a character in a work of...
Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, What’s wrong? You say it in a concerned way. He’...