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There are very few innocent sentences in writing.

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Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all th...more

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Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

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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

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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

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Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for...more

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No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

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

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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

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

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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

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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

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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 a...more

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Leyner's fiction is, in this regard, an eloquent reply to Gilder's prediction that our TV-culture problems can be resolved by the dismantling of image...more

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