...Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.

I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.

I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.

Mediocrity is contextual.

Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.

The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.