And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer's heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.

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?

Dr. Ambrose himself told Mark Nechtr...that the problem with young people, starting sometime in about the 1960s, is that they tend to live too intensely inside their own social moment, and thus tend to see all existence past age thirty or so as somehow postcoital. It's then that they'll relax, settle back, sad animals, to watch- and learn, as Ambrose himself said he learned from hard artistic and academic experience- that life instead of being rated a hard R, or even a soft R, actually rarely even makes it into distribution. Tends to be too slow.

We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.

America, as everybody knows, is a country of many contradictions, and a big contradiction for a long time has been between a very aggressive form of capitalism and consumerism against what might be called a kind of moral or civic impulse.

There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art.

Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.