I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.

The scare quotes burn off like fog.

I like to think - knowing that it's an enabling fiction - of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn't the only measure of value.

Maybe that's the way I'm private - I respect the privacy of "my" characters? Anyway, we're getting close to the whole "relatability" and "likability" thing.

Just in case God isn't dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.

I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.

Fiction doesn't appeal to me because it can describe physical appearances exhaustively or because it can offer access to the inner depths of an array of human characters - neither that kind of "realism" of bodily surfaces nor of individual psychologies seems particularly realistic to me.