[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.

Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.

Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.

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 stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me.

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.

There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it.