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The worst thing about irony for me is that it attenuates emotion.

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I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect thespeaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental.

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There are very few innocent sentences in writing.

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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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Irony and hip ennui are extremely authoritarian.

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Commercial comedy's often set up to feature an ironist makingdevastating sport of someone who's naive or sentimental or pretentious orpompous.

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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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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

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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.

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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