"

There are very few innocent sentences in writing.

"

Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol' "The audience is s...more

"

God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though--and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful a...more

"

For me, art that's alive and urgent is about what it is to be a human being.

"

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 ...more

"

If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people.

"

Huh. Well you and I just disagree. Maybe the world just feels differently to us. This is all going back to something that isn't really clear: that ava...more

"

Um um um um um. This business of—this business about marketing yourself, there’s nothing wrong with that. Unless we’re allowed to think that that’s—th...more

"

It's not what you lift, it's where you carry it.

"

Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Prog...more

"

Under fun’s new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don’t want to see or l...more

"

You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing— your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount o...more

"

Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn’t enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great f...more

"

Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about way...more

"

That’s why people use terms like flow or effortless to describe writing that they regard as really superb. They’re not saying effortless in terms of i...more